Extended Gameplay Video For The Last Federation - Solar Map And Combat

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out its game page for details, or swing by the forums for the game.  This is Arcen's largest title ever, and we're really excited to share it with folks.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is currently in progress, and we will be adding more players throughout the coming weeks leading up to release.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.

Earlier this week I wrote about the upcoming major changes to combat, and promised that a video would follow soon to show it to you in action.  Well, here you are!  And for good measure, there is also the first footage of the solar map in here -- I didn't mean for this video to run for an hour, but so it goes.  There was a lot to show!

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There are also a lot of new screenshots for you!

Until next time!

New Alpha Round For The Last Federation, Heavily Revised Combat

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out our preview discussing simulations in the game, the description of your role as an independent agent in the solar system,  details on the alien races, information about the "butterfly effect" in the game, and the final scene art for all the alien races, some of the planetary art, and screenshots of the solar map.  Oh, and the forums for the game are filled with lots of other detailed tidbits, too.  This is Arcen's largest title ever, and we're really excited to share it with folks.

Press about the game from RPS and PC Gamer.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is currently in progress, and we will be adding more players throughout the coming weeks leading up to release.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.  Right now we do have open spots still, but we may wind up needing to close signup past a certain point, because we definitely have a pretty huge list of people at this point (and there's only so much feedback we can process at any given time).

Hidey ho there!  Has it been a month, really, since the last blog post?  Indeed so.  So what gives?

New Release Date
For a variety of reasons, some of them relating to the game itself, and some of them relating to other titles that we don't want to get stomped by in the marketplace (cough Titanfall cough Diablo 3), we've decided to push back the release date of this game into April.  It may be as early as April 2, or a bit later on in.

New Round Of Alpha Testers
It's been a month since we've added any alpha testers to the testing pool, and it's also been a month since we gave our existing testers anything new to do.  We've been working away behind the scenes all this time, which is a first for us -- going a month in the middle of a testing cycle without releasing anything new to test.  Now we expect to be back to our usual rapid-cycling schedule.

I have not sent out the PMs yet, but if you have signed up to be an alpha tester, I will post the list of the people being added in this round on the forums here in a bit.

Note for testers: for the updated list of what still needs obvious tidying, please see this document.  It's not really all-inclusive of what we still have planned for the game prior to 1.0, but it hits the notes about things that we think are impeding the new-player experience in particular.

More Videos Coming Very Soon!
As you will see below, the existing combat video could not be less representative of the game at this point.  The combat isn't really even the same genre anymore.  We showed you RTS-style tactical combat before, and now the combat is still tactical but is entirely different.  I also will be getting you some video of the solar map stuff in action, although I did post a few screenshots of the solar map a month ago.

What's This About New Combat?
All right, so this is I believe pretty close to the combat interface that I showed you in the last video:

Basically it was always you against some other single ship -- an enemy flagship or an enemy outpost or whatever.  Your health and shields on the left, theirs on the right.  You both had squadrons of ships inside your flagships, and they would auto-deploy at various speeds.  You then control it like an RTS, mainly.  Whoever kills the other enemy ship first, wins.

There were a variety of things that made it more complicated from time to time, but overall that was kind of it.  The biggest complexity was in the solar map, and that's where the real "meat" of the game was.  Unfortunately, the combat just really wasn't something that was holding up its own weight in this sort of model -- it just lagged behind the rest of the game in the fun-factor, and so that was something we sought to address in a number of ways.

Here's a partially-evolved view:

For one thing, the above interface is a lot more attractive, and it was also more functional in a lot of ways.  Not shown in this particular screenshot is the "special abilities," of which you could have up to three.  These were special flagship-based abilities that you could trigger to do something like cloak your fleet, or loose anti-swarm lasers, or whatever.

That added an interesting element to the game, and it was something our testers played with some, but it frankly just wasn't enough.  What I'm about to say is why we don't use Kickstarter if we can at all help it.  One of the reasons, anyhow.  I get asked about this all the time, so here's a great example of why: we decided to radically alter the way that combat works, based partly on the feedback we were getting from testers, and then based on our own testing, too.

Here's what the combat interface looks like now:

Whoa, what's all this new stuff!  And where did a whole bunch of that old stuff go?  Let's go through it bit by bit:

No More Enemy Health/Shields
There are now quite a few more enemy flagships than just one (or even 5, as there were in one version of the game).  There are also a lot of allied flagships, potentially, too.  So you still see your own shields and health in the upper left, but that's it.  Other large ships and structures show increasing amounts of damage on their hull (you can see that on the Pirate Raven in the middle-right of the screen), and show their shields dimmer (and then gone) as a quick visualization of their status.  You can also hover over them to see what is going on if you like.

You Control Only Your Flagship, And Have Direct Guns
Yeah, this is no longer an RTS at all.  Right-clicking or using the WASD controls gives your flagship movement orders, and then holding down the left mouse button lets you spray bullets in any direction you choose.  Your flagship also still has passive guns that act without your input, just like it used to, but your main gun and your special abilities are far more powerful.

It is possible for you to get other ships that are "yours" at times, but you still can't control them.  They run on predetermined AI depending on the type of ship they are.  BUT!  Usually they also have guns that are triggered when you trigger your main gun, which is really cool.  So you can cause them to aim at your mouse cursor just like your flagship does, and fire when you fire.

Allies, Enemies, Neutral Parties, And Betrayal
It is now possible to have up to 5 "sides" involved in a battle, not including you.  So 6 in all, if you include yourself.  Each of these sides have either an allied, neutral, or enemy stance towards one another, and towards you.  You, in turn, either can have a guns-free or hold-fire stance toward each side.  All of your relationships to the other sides in the battle are shown on the lower left of the screen.

In this particular example, you can see that I am enemies with the Thoraxians, and by default I am guns-free against them.  It's rare that you'd want to hold fire against someone who wants to kill you, but you can.  You can also see that I am allied with the Acutians and the Andors in this particular battle.  They and I are cooperating to attack a very dangerous pirate convoy, as it turns out.  Whatever our relationships in the larger game are, we've come together for this one battle, anyway.

Of course, if I go guns-free against them, I can stab them in the back.  Depending on what I shoot, they may not notice right at first (there is a percent chance of them noticing).  But if I do much against them, their noticing is pretty much assured, and they will change to being my enemy for the remainder of the fight, as well as me getting a negative Influence penalty against them in the larger game.  Why would I ever do that?  Well, sometimes the best way to get behind the lines of someone is to pretend to be their friend for a bit.

Incidentally, in the screenshot above, a squadron of yellow (Acutian) interceptors have decided to take up an orbiting guard stance around me.  How sweet!  Every so often, an incoming missile clips one of them instead of hitting me. ;)

Minimap, Viewport, and Zoom
Previously, the viewport and zoom worked basically like AI War or Bionic Dues.  You could pan around at will, zoom incredibly far out, etc.  The ability to pan is now completely gone, and your ability to zoom is a lot more limited -- you can still zoom out, but not very far.

Basically this is somewhat simulating your "line of sight," but mainly it facilitates you actually being able to aim your direct guns.  There are a lot of reasons this works better in the new combat model, but it just feeling more natural and fun is a big part of it.  Not being omniscient on the battlefield is well-known as a fun thing (hence the fog of war in many RTS games), and being focused on your immediate surroundings helps to make the experience more immersive in my opinion.

Not that I'm saying I would change AI War or Bionic Dues, or that that zooming/panning model is wrong for them.  It's perfect in those contexts, to me at least.  But this game is now a lot more divorced from them, and so for this particular context this new view style makes a lot more sense.

Replacing the ability to pan and to far-zoom, and that old (hard to see) "enemy offscreen in that direction" indicator, is a nifty new minimap that you can toggle between three different sizes.  This minimap is pretty omniscient, but all it shows you is three types of blip: "something important," flagship, and squadron.  So you can find stuff around you, but you don't have details of exactly what each blip is beyond its category.  This turns out to be a really happy medium between being completely blind in a fog of war (not fun in a large space) and being omniscient (in this context, also less fun in my opinion).

Special Abilities
Your flagship now has five of these.  In the last combat video, they didn't even exist yet.  In the last tester builds, you had only three, and they were not categorized.  Now they are categorized by slot:

- 2 slots for secondary weapons
- 1 slot for an "operational" ability
- 2 slots for "special" abilities

Secondary weapons are either things that you trigger with a quick keypress or mouse-click and which do AOE damage around you or home onto a specific enemy or whatever, or they are things that "arm" an additional weapon that gets added to your left mouse button (so that you fire both your normal primary weapon and the newly-armed secondary weapon at the same time).  Your primary weapon has infinite ammo, but your secondary ones (and abilities in general) do not.

Operational abilities typically either call in help from outside forces (inviting mercenaries to come in as an enemy to everyone, including you, for instance), or spawn squadrons or orbital bombers or what have you.  Each type of operation pairs both a special variant of squadron ships with unique stats/abilities, with AI appropriate to them.

The special abilities are then just kind of a catch-all for everything else.  It might be to do with cloaking or other forms of stealth, trading shields and health for extra attack power for a brief time, or doing something like restoring your shields or throwing out a debris field to block incoming enemy shots.

Better Combat Speed, And Control Of Combat Speed
The default speed of combat is now about half as fast as what was shown in the last video.  It's something that people went "wow that seems way too fast" as the main complaint there.  You can easily slow it down even more if you prefer, to whatever floats your boat (or speed it up, even).  You can do that when you start a new game, during battle, whenever.

Also during battle, you can temporarily slow it down 4x by tapping the Slow-Mo hotkey or on-screen button.  If you're worried about the ability to aim at ships in a crunch, this is one way to get around that.

Fast-Forward has also been joined by Super-Fast-Forward, which is something I use a lot when I want to zip across a gap of space.  Since these are more dangerous than slow-mo, these you have to hold down the button to make them go faster, rather than tapping them to toggle.  Sometimes there just isn't anything that I need to make decision on for a moment, and there's no sense in me just sitting there waiting out the clock.  Being able to quickly adjust the flow of time really helps to make the pacing feel super smooth at all times, because the pacing is exactly whatever I want it to be.

Withdraw Replaces Retreat, And Is Improved In General
"Retreat" can be such an ugly word.  It implies failure.  In the new combat model, however, it is entirely likely that you may enter a battle ostensibly with one set of goals, but really you actually have some other secret goals that you have set for yourself.  You then set about doing whatever it was you wanted to do, and then you withdraw.  In that case do you "fail" the main action that you were hired to do?  Heck yes.  Do you care?  Not a bit, because your acceptance of the main action was just a ruse in the first place.

Other times you'll be withdrawing because you simply are outgunned, and it really is a retreat to save your hide.  It's important to know when to do this.

And still other times, withdrawing successfully is simply the last step in successfully resolving a battle.  Your goal frequently has nothing to do with "just go in and murder everyone."  Instead the enemy forces are an obstacle to your going in and destroying or capturing special enemy ships, or whatever else your target is.  The enemy forces are understandably pissed after you do this, so the last step is managing to actually withdraw successfully without getting killed.

Better Integration With The Solar Map Part Of The Game
This is a really key thing.  Previously, the combat was a bit too mini-game-ish for my taste.  That's how it was originally conceived, but that bothered me increasingly much.  The fact that we had an auto-resolve option in the game was kind of a testament to the fact that combat was basically just a skill check.

No longer.  Now, things that you do during the course of combat have a lot of effects on the larger game, so the auto-resolve is actually gone.  You may destroy civilian installations, causing various positive and/or negative consequences.  You may wind up poisoning the atmosphere of a planet through your excessive use of nuclear missiles.  You may whittle down an enemy armada and then retreat, utterly failing the immediate mission but still creating an opening for an ally of yours to break through.

On the flip side, the solar map feeds a lot more data in to combat, too.  Races that are allies in the larger game may send in squadrons to help beleaguered allies.  When races are besieging a planet, you can choose to come in and help out either side, and even be a turncoat in the middle of battle if you choose to.  And so on and so forth.

All in all, the solar map previously had this cool feeling of you being the small guy in a much larger living ecosystem of aliens, but at the same time you being able to affect things from the shadows in a very powerful way.  Combat did not have that feeling.  Now it does.  I tend to really think of the new combat as being "Batman in space," in a lot of ways, heh.

Handling Of Health And Ammo
As mentioned before, your guns don't have ammo, but your 5 special abilities all do.  Previously, you had to visit any planet or outpost to get the ammo replenished.  That meant that conservation of the ammo between multi-stage battles was important.  In the end that didn't add much, so now you just get all your ammo back after each fight.

Health previously worked the same way, in terms of you getting that whenever you visited any planet or outpost.  But THAT tended to cheapen health, and reduce the tension in ways that I didn't like.  The goal with that auto-restoration was to make it so that you didn't have a fiddly case of having to go and heal constantly at some specific location, and wade through menus to do so.

As it stands now, normally you gain no health back at all, except under two circumstances:
1. You go to the black market and take what amounts to a bit of a bad deal to get repaired.
2. You successfully complete any friendly military action for any race, and they'll heal you for free in gratitude.

This makes it so that health is a bit more scarce in some circumstances, but not in others.  It's a pretty interesting dynamic, and I find that it makes things pleasantly tense in fun ways.

So What Now?
We're continuing to test and refine, of course.  There are also some straggler features and content, most of it relating to the new combat model, that we want to get in there.  There's also some visual stuff that we haven't had time to polish to our liking, and the sound effects are yet to be added (although probably 80% of the music is in place now).

Hopefully this will prove to be a comfortable schedule, but it really depends on what testers other than myself start finding.

Thanks for reading!

The Last Federation - Solar Map Screenshots

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out our first sneak preview about it, or our preview discussing simulations in the game.  Also our recent podcast with Space Game Junkie with lots of other details, the description of your role as an independent agent in the solar system,  details on the alien races, information about the "butterfly effect" in the game, and the final scene art for all the alien races, some of the planetary art, and a written preview with info about combat.  Then we've got this first video of combat, info on the new combat GUI and other upcoming combat changes, and the intro story video.  Oh, and the forums for the game are filled with lots of other detailed tidbits, too.

Press about the game from RPS and PC Gamer.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is currently in progress, and we will be adding more players throughout the coming weeks leading up to release.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.  Right now we do have open spots still, but we may wind up needing to close signup past a certain point, because we definitely have a pretty huge list of people at this point (and there's only so much feedback we can process at any given time).

This is a very short post today, and it's just to share a very limited set of screenshots.  There are a bunch of other subscreens I'd like to show you, and the updated combat GUI as well, but it's very late and I'm very tired.  So you get this. ;)  I'll have a new video up of various parts of the game, including the grand strategy bits, either tomorrow or the next day.

You can click all of these for larger versions, by the way.

Here I am at the very start of a game, parked at the Andor homeworld (of this particular game).  You can see some info about it and about my status in the bottom there, and some buttons for me to interact with them and their planet.  There are also tabs visible there that let you get into much more nitty-gritty non-location-specific data.  On the right-hand side, you can see recent notifications about racial actions and location events.  It's just three minor political notes, and then the Andors starting to accelerate their population growth.  Everyone else is still trying to become spacefaring.

Skipping ahead... I'm not actually playing in this game, I'm just in observer mode watching to see what unfolds without my intervention.  Looks like the Burlusts and the Thoraxians are now spacefaring, and a lot more stuff has been happening recently.  You can see both some defensive armadas and some picket ones.  It looks wicked cool in motion, I look forward to showing you the video of the ship and satellite swarms.

Okay, so actually here is one simple but useful subscreen screenshot for you.  This is the racial power grid, which basically shows how everyone (and pirates, but not you) is getting on.  Turns out, in general... not well.  The Burlusts have captured 6 of the 8 planets and have a Fear Empire up and running.  There are 10 pirate bases, mostly of races run off their homeworlds by the Burlusts, most likely.  I didn't hover to see, but it does tell you.

Interestingly, the other "most evil" race is the only other one that is surviving in this particular game.  The Thoraxians have a measly 2 armadas.  The thing is, they still have 11.7 billion citizens, all of whom count as soldiers.  That's true of the Burlusts as well, and heck they have almost 80 billion soldiers.  But it's basically Klingons versus the aliens from Alien.  Every time the Burlusts land on the Thoraxian homeworld, it's largely slaughter.  It's a good day to die, indeed.  But the Thoraxians are so weakened in space that they aren't going anywhere fast, either.  Without my intervention, my bet is that the Burlusts would wear them down eventually in some fashion.  With my intervention... hmm, I might could get the Thoraxians back into fighting form, or I might just get myself killed.  It would be really tough.

Right, so I reloaded a save from the start of that game, and it played out really differently.  This time the Thoraxians have a 5-planet Fear Empire, and the Burlusts have a very weak set of two planets.  I am not sure why the Thoraxians have not taken them out yet, as they are super aggressive.  The in-game graphs and logs would tell me, but I didn't look that closely into it.

More interestingly, the Andors in this one are really holding their own.  I didn't look at exact numbers, but you can see that not only are they holding a pretty sizeable defensive fleet there, but they were beating on somebody else (probably that Burlust planet near them) pretty recently, too.  They're too nice to capture planets, but that doesn't stop them from getting into big scuffles.

I could totally turn the tide of this.  Or at least have a good chance.  Go in, befriend the Andors, run some missions against the Thoraxians (hey, they're going to hate me anyway), get the Andors to help the Burlusts, help the Burlusts build up, use them to take over the Thoraxian planets while the Andors play rear guard and send ships and support, and on from there.  If I could survive the resultant Thoraxian assassins and internal Burlust wars long enough, I could probably pull that off.  It would be pretty grueling, but in a fun way.

Oh, if you like graphs, here's one from the other day.  This one is showing the population lines for all the races over the course of a game.  As you can see, the Burlusts got a runaway start on this one, but the Acutiants were pretty neck-and-neck there for a while.  I easily could have turned the tide in favor of the Acutians before whatever that junction point was, if I had actually been playing rather than observing.

Also of interest, the Peltians have been slowly but steadily gaining population.  They're still way behind the Burlusts in this one, but between them and the Acutians I'm sure I could pull something off.  The Peltians are all about bombardment from orbit, and the Acutians might just hate the Burlusts enough to pull out a planetcracker or two if I give them the opening.

I had a crazy screenshot where the Peltians had taken over most of the solar system and were absolutely swarming everywhere (these are the little barn-owl communist Ewok-like guys, remember), just wrecking the whole solar system.  That happened I think three games in a row, so it was pretty interesting seeing the most innocent race form several Fear Empires, heh.


Of course, all of that is just the surface story.  As you can glean from the sidebar of the event and actions that are happening, plus the "chatter" scrolling across the bottom of these screens, a lot more is going on behind the scenes, and you normally would be paying attention to that as you play.  Using all those things to inform your own strategic and tactical choices, of course.

Okay, whew, that was longer than I intended.  Now it's really late!  But I'm very excited to be able to share this stuff with you, at any rate.  Enjoy!

The Last Federation - Intro Story Video

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out our first sneak preview about it, or our preview discussing simulations in the game.  Also our recent podcast with Space Game Junkie with lots of other details, the description of your role as an independent agent in the solar system,  details on the alien races, information about the "butterfly effect" in the game, and the final scene art for all the alien races, some of the planetary art, and a written preview with info about combat.  Then we've got this first video of combat, and info on the new combat GUI and other upcoming combat changes.  Oh, and the forums for the game are filled with lots of other detailed tidbits, too.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is currently in a very limited early form, and we will be adding more players throughout the coming weeks leading up to release.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.  Right now we do have open spots still, but we may wind up needing to close signup past a certain point, because we definitely have a pretty huge list of people at this point (and there's only so much feedback we can process at any given time).

The Last Federation is an upcoming Grand Strategy + RTS Tactics game from Arcen Games.  You play as a small mercenary fleet in a solar system teeming with eight alien races of various dispositions.  Your goal is to unify the survivors into a solar federation that will bring peace.  Doing so requires a lot of fighting, a lot of political deals and backstabbing, and occasionally strapping rockets to a moon.

This is the intro video to the game -- it gives you the background info on why you are doing what you are doing.  Recently we did also put up a video of an alpha version of combat, and we'll have more gameplay videos coming up this week, as well.

Enjoy!

The Last Federation - New Combat GUI And Upcoming Combat Changes

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out our first sneak preview about it, or our preview discussing simulations in the game.  Also our recent podcast with Space Game Junkie with lots of other details, the description of your role as an independent agent in the solar system,  details on the alien races, information about the "butterfly effect" in the game, and the final scene art for all the alien races, some of the planetary art, and a written preview with info about combat.  Then we've got this first video of combat, too.  Oh, and the forums for the game are filled with lots of other detailed tidbits, too.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is currently in a very limited early form, and we will be adding more players throughout the coming weeks leading up to release.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.  Right now we do have open spots still, but we may wind up needing to close signup past a certain point, because we definitely have a pretty huge list of people at this point (and there's only so much feedback we can process at any given time).

Variety of news today!  I'm pretty slammed in terms of time schedule, so I'll be brief for once. ;)

New Combat GUI
As you can see in the above screenshot (click to make it larger), the GUI for the combat portion of the game has been completely redesigned and is a lot more attractive as well as a lot more effective in how it makes use of space.  What you're seeing in the screenshot there isn't quite final, as there are some tabs missing in the bottom tooltip area, among a few other things.  But there's a lot of goodness there, and actually this speaks very well to how the solar map GUI looks.

About The Speed Of Combat
One of the biggest comments we got about the first combat video was "wow that looks fast."  Bear in mind that I play on a really fast setting, and I should have taken that into consideration when making the video -- apologies for that.  But as mentioned in the video, if you feel the combat is too fast (or too slow, somehow), then you can adjust the speed at any time in the game.  Both the baseline speed, as well as using the fast forward, slow mo, and super fast forward buttons (and pause of course) for temporary adjustments.

Our first alpha testers got into the game and felt like the default speed was too fast by a substantial margin, which is one of those "you don't really know until you get people playing it" sorts of things.  So we've both cut the default speed by half, as well as made the speed settings more prominent when you are first starting a new game (so if you go "ugh this is too slow" or "wow this is too fast" you know that the settings even exist).

At any rate, to clarify against any concerns, this is most definitely not a twitch sort of game.  You can play it that way, if you want.  I kind of find it fun that way, actually.  But if you want to play it extremely slowly and thoughtfully, you can do so as well.  Using a really slow speed interspersed with super-fast-forward bursts and the pause key is practically like playing a turn-based game.

Asymmetry In Combat
I think my love for asymmetry is well established at this point.  In the current tests with combat, and based on my own feelings with playing with it more and more, I've come to a realization: the combat is extremely fun from a tactile standpoint and mechanically-speaking, but there is not enough going on tactically to really make it interesting for the long haul. 

Also, having the enemy forces be kind of a mirror of the player forces is both dull/repetitive as well as something that goes against the spirit of the game's theme.  You're supposed to be a little rogue mercenary fleet, so having enemy forces that are similar in size to you numerically is not a great thing.  Outside of combat, you really do get the proper sense of being really outnumbered.  But in terms of in-combat mechanics, that same sort of feeling needs to persist across.  A mercenary of this sort wins by being awesome and clever, not by brute force -- again, a big theme in the larger game, but not something expressed in combat yet.

So!  What we're doing is introducing more complicated battlefields with discarded Hydral technology in them (again, very thematically fitting) that only you can make use of.  You can also use Hydral technology to get some special abilities/weapons that your enemies will never be able to make use of.  What the enemy will now have, however, is overwhelming force compared to you.  These are planetary forces versus one tiny little mercenary fleet, after all.  But by using your bag of tricks, you can even things out and get the battles won.

A big part of this is making it so that you are making more tactical decision in a more complicated battlefield.  Part of that means giving you a larger "puzzle," so to speak, where there are more enemies in more places, and more things that you can also exploit for gain in more places.  This gives you a battlefield that you need to size up, choose your intermediate objectives, and use those to achieve your ultimate objective.

Again, all stuff you already do on the larger game.  But now we're getting into that in the combat side of things, too.  Getting these things in place is my big goal for the first half of this next week, and we'll be letting in a big batch of more alpha testers when we get there.  And I'll have a new combat video around then, too.

Stay tuned!

The Last Federation - First Alpha Footage (Combat!)

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out our first sneak preview about it, or our preview discussing simulations in the game.  Also our recent podcast with Space Game Junkie with lots of other details, the description of your role as an independent agent in the solar system,  details on the alien races, information about the "butterfly effect" in the game, and the final scene art for all the alien races, some of the planetary art, and a written preview with info about combat.  Oh, and the forums for the game are filled with lots of other detailed tidbits, too.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is going to be starting the 28th of this month.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.  Right now we do have open spots still, but we may wind up needing to close signup past a certain point, because we definitely have a pretty huge list of people at this point (and there's only so much feedback we can process at any given time).

The Last Federation is an upcoming grand strategy + tactics hybrid strategy game from Arcen Games. You play as a small mercenary fleet in a solar system teeming with eight alien races of various dispositions. Your goal is to unify the survivors into a solar federation that will bring peace. Doing so requires a lot of mercenary contracts, a lot of political deals and backstabbing, and occasionally strapping rockets to a moon.

This video shows some alpha footage with graphics that are about 90% complete, but missing some important things here and there. Balance on the ships is also a work in progress, as is the enemy ship AI. Even so, the game is already really fun and it is often hard for Keith and I to keep our "tests" to a strictly professional time limit. ;) I actually had intended just to show you one quick skirmish here, but I wound up doing a longer video and showing three, anyhow.

By the way, apologies for the jerky framerate at the very start of the video. It clears up after a bit; something was going on with my hard drive for some reason, and running FRAPS was causing extreme periodic lag for the first couple of minutes of the video.

More The Last Federation Info Coming Up! Plus Combat Teaser #1

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out our first sneak preview about it, or our preview discussing simulations in the game.  Also our recent podcast with Space Game Junkie with lots of other details, the description of your role as an independent agent in the solar system,  details on the alien races, information about the "butterfly effect" in the game, and the final scene art for all the alien races, and some of the planetary art.  Oh, and the forums for the game are filled with lots of other detailed tidbits, too.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is going to be starting around the 27th of this month.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.  Right now we do have open spots still, but we may wind up needing to close signup past a certain point, because we're getting such a huge response to this (and there's only so much feedback we can process at any given time).

Lots Of New Kinds Of Information Coming Soon (In Bits And Pieces Starting Now)!
As you may have noticed if you've been following the game, I've been talking extensively about the simulation and races in the game, how the world works, showing side-view ship art, and showing various scene art.

But I haven't shown true screenshots of non-scene-art stuff yet, no videos yet, and I have not talked in any substantial detail about the combat model at all.  Believe me, I've been itching to do all of the above, and for those longtime fans of the company you know just how hard it is for me to keep my mouth shut on something like this, heh.

We unfortunately learned with A Valley Without Wind 1 that even the earliest images/videos/info that gets put out about a game tend to haunt it for the rest of its life.  So in that light, I've really wanted to put our best foot forward with everything that I tell you or show you, and to that end have only been showing and telling about final or near-final stuff.

Since there have been so many bits and bobs with the art that were still in progress, and interface design stuff, and very substantial iterations on the combat, those things have remained kind of hidden until now.  But over the course of the next couple of weeks, I'll have new information and graphics and so forth to share with you every few days.  Stay tuned!

First Up, Some Combat Art!
In the past, I've shown you the side-view art for the ships, such as this one for the flagships:

Originally we were doing combat from a side view with 1v1 ship combat, and so this was the art we were actually using in combat itself.  But that combat model was not as satisfying as hoped, for a wide variety of reasons, and so we've shifted things heavily to instead be a more top-down RTS approach.  (This is exactly what I'm talking about with not showing things too soon with images or details publicly, incidentally -- people are uneasy seeing "how the hotdog is made" a lot of the time.)

These side-view images that you've seen before are still in the game, but are used mainly for show now.  You'll see them flying by in the main menu, you see them in certain scene art from various perspectives, and a few other contexts.  But no longer combat itself.  Instead, in combat, you have this:

You can click both of the above images to get full-scale versions, by the way -- they are scaled down a bit from actual in-game resolution, due to the width of the content column on the blog.

It's also crucial that I mention that the top-down ships above are a WIP still -- some of the smaller ships have some details on them that are still a bit rough, and the smoke plumes behind the ships likely won't remain since those don't animate well.

Those caveats out of the way, I'm really excited by the look that Blue has come up with for these ships.  You can see how wonderfully the colors shift to show which faction they belong to -- way more attractive and smooth than in AI War, and extremely clear even from fairly zoomed out because of how the engine jets themselves are colored.

The largest ships, in the center, are vanilla flagships -- what is shown from the side-view higher up in this post.  The smaller ships are (from left to right, top to bottom): pirate fighter, fighter, frigate, and armed spy drone.  Basically all of the smallest-possible ships, next to one of the largest-possible ships.

Combat Tidbits Round #1
So now that you've seen how some of the graphics look, there are some things that I'd like to share about how combat itself works.

Fleets
All of the ships in the game are organized into fleets.  You have one fleet, period.  You live on your flagship.  You can purchase squadrons of ships and staff them with either AI or with commissioned mercenaries of various races.

The 8 races, however, will wind up having hundreds and hundreds of fleets, between them.  All of them are piloted by members of their own race, which has some effects that I'll mention a bit lower down.

Remember, You Are A Mercenary
This game is very different from other strategy games, in that you are not remotely a Major Power in the solar system.  You are puny.  By the end of the game, you might be 1/100th the strength of one of the factions on the map.

This might remind you somewhat of AI War, but unlike AI War I would not classify this as a David vs Goliath situation.  In AI War, you are directly facing off against the AI -- in TLF, you don't really have any "opponents," per se. 

You have various people trying to kill you at various times, sure -- and you may anger some race to the point that they hate you forever, sure.  And yeah, okay, there are pirates, assassins, and Anti-Federation Alliance people that might specifically be sent to kill you.  But those last three are more on your scale, they aren't major planetary powers.

Your role is to run contracts throughout the solar system, which typically involves combat of your fleet versus another fleet or in some cases fleets.  Through your actions, you either coerce, convince, or bargain with the major powers to do what you want.  And you exploit holes in their forces to do so, as they war against each other, and try to become more powerful, etc.  It's amazing what you can do as the little guy.

Squadrons
All of your ships, and all of the ships of other fleets as well, are organized into squadrons.  A squadron is a homogeneous group of ships, such as two battleships or 10 fighters or whatever.  Higher-level fleets can have larger numbers of ships per squadron.

Squadrons are auto-bound to the hotkeys 1 through 0, so that you can easily move them as groups if you like.  Or you can split your squadrons -- during battles, you can give orders to ships individually just like in AI War, or at the squadron level, or in any arbitrary groups you like.  The AI keeps its squadrons together more, but still uses its ships individually within that group.

Pilots
There aren't a huge number of types of ships in this game -- the basic roster is just 5 kinds of ships (Fighter, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Battleship).  Overall there are 24 different ships in the game, but a good 14 of them are very specialized, and six are pirate vessels.

But!  This is where pilots come in.  Depending on what race is actually flying a type of ship, that ship gets behavioral or stat bonuses or penalties.  This means that the fighter vessel from each of the 8 races is different, with different bonuses.

Your vanilla "ship AI" ships don't have any special bonuses, but you also don't have to pay any pilots to run them.  If you want to hire mercenaries from a given race, then you can do so for each kind of ship class.  Aka, you could have Burlusts flying your fighters, and Evucks flying your Battleships, if you want.

But the mercenaries from each race want a commission that depends on what kind of ship they are flying and how many of that ship they are flying.  The commission gets taken out of your earnings from any contracts you undertake -- so that gives you extra abilities, but at a cost of some of your earnings.  Figuring out exactly what combination of stuff you want to use in your fleet is really interesting.

Let's do some quick math.  In the early game, you can have up to three squadrons, and by later in the game you can have up to 10.  There are 5 basic types of ships that can go in each squadron, or 10 if you get all the small pirate ship technologies.  There are then 8 different options for pilots for each of those 10 types (ship AI, plus then every race except the Thoraxians -- they are a hive mind per planetary queen, so they have no mercenaries or pirates or other independent thinkers).

Now let's use the awesome combination calculator. Since we have 10 different kinds of ships, out of which you can choose up to 10, repeats allowed, that is a whopping 92,378 possible fleet makeups you can have.  But then you have the pilots added on -- 8 different choices, applied to 10 kinds of ships, again with repeats allowed.  That's a further 19,448 different ways that you can choose your pilots.  To get the unique number of squadrons+pilot combinations, you multiply those together and get... 1,796,567,344.

1.8 billion?  Not bad for variety, I'd say -- you have some room for creativity. ;)  If my math is wrong, someone please correct me and I'll update the post.  Those numbers seem egregiously high to me, to be honest, but I can't find fault with my formulas, so...  Anyway, one way or another, the numbers are really big.

Squadron Deployment
Another thing that is really important about squadrons is how they are deployed in battle.  When battle starts, all you have is your flagship out.  It's kind of like an aircraft carrier -- it's scrambling its ships to get them into play.

The order it scrambles them is in a little queue at the bottom of your screen, and initially matches the order of your squadrons from your customization screen.  However, you can reorder the queue as the tactical situation evolves, to better react to what your enemy is deploying off their flagship.  This is a really important consideration during combat.

The Goal Of Combat
In most types of combat, the combat ends when one of the two "centerpiece" ships is destroyed.  When talking about military fleets, that's always a flagship of some kind.  If you're doing something like raiding a freighter convoy or a spy squad, though, then the centerpiece would be a freighter or an armed spy drone, respectively.

Once the enemy centerpiece is destroyed, you win the combat.  Or if they destroy your flagship, then you lose.  The entire game, because you just died -- not just that one battle.  Sometimes retreating from a battle that is unwinnable is the only thing you can really do.

The Ramifications Of Combat
Combat is usually done in order to resolve a contract, for which you are rewarded with money and/or bargaining power.  There is no other way to get bargaining power other than completing contracts, and money can only be obtained through either contracts or taking out temporary loans.

Here is another place that squadrons are important: the individual ships within each squadron, if they survive, are small enough that they can be auto-repaired for free for you as soon as combat ends.  However, any ships that were completely lost have to be replaced for money.  This is as simple as simply flying into dock at any planet, or at the black market, and it "refleets" you instantly and automatically.  If you don't like the expenditure of money that took place during a refleeting, you can sell your ships back at full value, so there is no need to worry or be fiddly about it.  Your flagship also has to be repaired for money, as it retains whatever damage it sustained during a battle.

What this means is that every ship you lose in battle is cutting into your profit margin.  If you want to do well in the game on higher difficulties, you don't want to just win the combats -- you want to win well.  Some ship losses are inevitable and necessary, but you don't want it to be too many.  At an advanced level of play, this might be a tough decision: do you hire stronger mercenaries for commission who then help you lose fewer ships?  Or do you avoid the commissions, but lose more ships that you then have to replace?

Interestingly, this means that if you are going to win the game, you are either going to have won or retreated from every battle you entered into.  But you can still do that and lose, because of the larger solar system situation deteriorating and the federation collapsing.  The larger game is made to be difficult even if you win every battle.  Depending on your difficulty settings.  Don't let that scare you off if you're more of a casual player -- difficulty options abound, and this game is often going to be more about having fun and seeing what stories develop than actually winning, anyway.

Other Cool Stuff
Depending on where your battle is taking place, you might find yourself in empty deep space, in the ice belt, in the asteroid belt, or in orbit around some planet.  All of these things matter.

In the asteroid belt and in the ice belt you have to deal with floating asteroids and ice chunks.  Don't worry, these won't harm your ships, so you don't have to micromanage your ships to go around them or anything.  But these objects do block shots from both yourself and from enemies, so they provide interesting tactical cover.  Ships can cross over them without taking damage, as noted, but to do so causes them to slow way down as they are crossing over (aka around in the Z axis) the object.

Around planets, you have gravity wells of various strengths (depending on the type of planet -- ice dwarfs have almost no gravity well, while a hypertonic gas giant has a very strong one).  Gravity wells are represented very simply.  They don't actively cause ships or ships to get pulled anywhere when the ships are stationary, but they do cause a speedup when things are moving south on the screen, and a slowdown when things are moving north on the screen.  This can cause shots to bend, and makes it so that having the "high ground" of being in a higher orbit can be really valuable.

Space junk also makes an appearance around planets.  The more large ships that get destroyed at a planet (via either your battles or via wars between the factions, it doesn't matter), the more junk starts floating around in their orbit.  These pieces of junk wind up floating through your battlefields around that planet, basically working like asteroids or ice chunks, but moving much faster and providing only temporary cover.

Extra cool is that races can then harvest the junk around their planets if they are so inclined, which provides a boost to their planetary/ship construction projects during the harvesting, as well as reducing the amount of junk in their orbits.  There are a lot of grand-strategic implications to this.

Also, unlike AI War, the shots in this game are all simulated ballistics (as in games of ours like Valley 1 and 2).  So in other words, shots can be dodged by ships, or ships can move in front of other ships to shield them from shots.  Your shots don't hit your own ships (there's no friendly fire, that would just be insane), but it makes for some really interesting shielding strategies to protect your flagship even from long-range shots by sacrificing (for instance) some fighters.

This isn't a twitch game, but at an advanced level of play, adjusting your trajectories in response to enemy actions is a good thing to be doing.  I should also mention that both your ships and enemy ships "lead" their targets (again unlike AI War), so you may be wondering "why the heck did that ship just shoot over there at that empty space?" and then the shot collides with something that was on a trajectory to be there at the time the bullet arrives.  This is one of those cases where, if the shot from the enemy is slow enough and from far enough away, you can change trajectories of your ships to get out of its way.


That's it for today.  Hopefully that gives you some tantalizing details on combat, finally.  Enjoy!

Please read if you're interested in the private The Last Federation alpha.

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out our first sneak preview about it, or our preview discussing simulations in the game.  Also our recent podcast with Space Game Junkie with lots of other details, the description of your role as an independent agent in the solar system,  details on the alien races, information about the "butterfly effect" in the game, and the final scene art for all the alien races.  Oh, and the forums for the game are filled with lots of other detailed tidbits, too.

Just a brief note here, to point you to an important forum post.  If you're interested in being a part of the private alpha for the game, please head over to that post, give it a read, and then follow the instructions there. 

If you've already signed up for the alpha, please still go read that forum post, as we're now asking people which round of alpha testing they would like to be a part of.

Alpha is coming up in the next 1 to 2 weeks, so we're getting things like that sorted out in advance.

Thanks!

Planetary Art For The Last Federation, Plus News On Combat

The Last Federation is a really unique game in that it is a strategy/tactics game set inside a simulation game.  Check out our first sneak preview about it, or our preview discussing simulations in the game.  Also our recent podcast with Space Game Junkie with lots of other details, the description of your role as an independent agent in the solar system,  details on the alien races, information about the "butterfly effect" in the game, and the final scene art for all the alien races.  Oh, and the forums for the game are filled with lots of other detailed tidbits, too.

Hey folks!  I can't believe it's been almost a month since my last blog post -- sorry about that.  The holidays happened, and then we've just been incredibly busy with the game.  At this point we're about 5-6 weeks out out from the 1.0 release of the game, and 1-2 weeks out from the private alpha.  I posted some news about that on the forum late last week.

Planetary Scene Art
First off, here's some art!  These are small-scale versions of the larger planet-scene art that you see in various contexts in the game, mainly when you are looking at the details of a planet, at the planet's market, taking contracts at a planet, etc.

These scenes really help to give you a sense of place with each planet, I feel like, rather than just having the planets be a tiny icon and then all those other screens just be bland menus.  Same general idea as the scenes for dealing with the alien races politically.  There are 11 planet types in all, falling into 4 zones in the solar system -- inner system, habitable zone, outer system, and ice belt.  There is also an asteroid belt where pirates tend to live, and where there are various other space installations.  There are two images for each planet -- one that is more distant, from orbit, and one that is on the ground in one of the cities on that planet.  Here are some examples:

Transition Desert - Orbit (Habitable Zone planet based on Mars)
 

Iron Silicate - City View (Inner System planet that is hypothetical but realistic)

Terrestrial Planet - City View (Habitable Zone planet based on Earth)

Dense Turbulent Gas Giant - Orbit (Outer System planet based on Neptune)

Ice Dwarf - City View (Ice Belt planet based on trans-Neptunian objects in our solar system)

Terrestrial Planet - Orbit (The other view of the Habitable Zone planets based on Earth)

Combat Mechanics
Combat is one of those things that we have yet to show, and I had hoped to be able to share some videos of that with you early this week or even late last week.  Unfortunately that is not quite yet to be.  This game is one of two parts, and always has been -- the overall simulation and politics/contracts/etc model, and then the combat.

The idea is for them to mesh as well as possible, and essentially be seen as one coherent thing, not two distinct things that you switch back and forth between.  Kind of like how in AI War there are lots of grand strategy bits and some tower defense bits, but those really just mesh into the overall RTS nature of the game.

There were a number of problems with the combat model we were using up until recently, and the meshing of the two parts of the game was one of them.  The other combat model just wasn't as fun as we'd hoped it would be, and it wound up being a bit too twitch-based to fit well with the more contemplative larger model.  The single-combat ship vs ship model was also something a lot of folks on our forums were skeptical of, and in the end they were right.

Ultimately what we are doing now is shifting to multi-ship combat, in a more RTS style of gameplay for the combat itself.  It's amazing how right the new concepts feel in terms of just giving a more visceral feel to the combat, and something that is more connected and logical to the overall scope of the game.  I think you'll really like it, and it fits right in with some things that Arcen is known for doing really well, so that's always a plus, too.

The bad news on that front is that means we can't really show you any video or screenshots for another week or so when it comes to those parts.  Overall screenshots have been really thin on the ground so far because we're still working on the visuals for the GUIs all over the place.  We learned with Valley 1 that if we show working screenshots with temporary art too soon, then those wind up getting plastered all over the Internet and criticized.  So you'll be seeing near-final screenshots and art only -- and soon!

That's it for today.  Enjoy!