Star Wars: Rebellion

Rebellion (“Supremacy” in the UK – the Good Friday Agreement hadn’t been signed yet) looks like a quick reskin of a popular new genre – quite common for the era – but the 4x genre is actually right up Star Wars‘ exhaust port. These are the games like Masters of Orion and Space Empires – simulators requiring you to start small in funds and equipment and best your opponent in securing both to seize control of the galaxy. In fact, many of the technologies or ships in these games borrow, often liberally, from the Star Wars films. So a game with the benefit of the license should do gangbusters, right?

You play as either the Empire or the Rebellion – there are no Hutts or similar attempts at a third faction. You can define each game’s galaxy by both AI difficulty and size (the largest galaxy holds 200 planets). Each planet you capture offers randomized slots for building mines and production facilities. Planets can lean heavily one way or another, such as a moon with maximum mining slots and no facility slots, or a weak planet with only a couple of both. Expect to build up and defend your “production planets” and to fight over ones with lots of available slots.

Mines collect ore and refineries convert ore into points, which then go toward constructing buildings or units. Supply lines are not considered, while all projects pull from your galactic pool of points. Production facilities churn out troops, vehicles, and ships. You can set other destinations for the finished goods, at the cost of travel time. It’s a good way to dedicate units to the war front as soon at they leave the factory. However, any ground units need to be placed on board a capital ship to move them. Sending them directly from a distant production planet suffers the largest possible travel time, as they hail the equivalent of a taxi. Manually building and managing cargo ships is a much faster alternative.

Distant, barren planets can be colonized by your forces at the expense of building construction yards and refineries from scratch. “Core” worlds with pre-built structures have the additional factor of their inhabitants to consider. If they like your side, it will be harder for your foe to subvert you. If they prefer the other team, you must garrison troops there to prevent piracy, work stoppages, and eventually, a full-blown uprising. Planets that support the other side more fervently obviously require more troops to keep things operating and “civil.” As the opposing team, you can run secret missions on enemy planets to stoke the fires of, ahem, rebellion.

There aren’t as many differences between the two sides as you would think. You will always be building fleets, armies, and taking over planets. Victory for even the Rebellion will eventually be based in overwhelming military force. However, the differences that do exist are certainly true to the films. For capital ships and ground units, Rebels are generally faster to build, but weaker, with the Empire slower to build, but stronger. Recruitable heroes for each side are vastly better at varying skills than regular “buildable” troops. The Rebellion generally has better diplomats and sabotage agents, while the Empire has better military commanders and spies.

Heroes are meant to either include in land or space garrisons – thereby boosting the planet’s defense and effectiveness significantly – or to lead a number of missions that include Recon, Sabotage, Kidnapping, and Diplomacy. Recon missions are the primary source of information about enemy activities and their strength on specific planets. A recon mission on a planet you own will uncover enemy agents operating there, or incoming enemy fleets. Recon missions on planets you don’t own give a snapshot of the situation at that time – meaning a planet you haven’t visited in a while may have secretly blossomed into an enemy superbase.

Diplomacy missions are the only way to change a planet’s population toward your side. If you try to conquer a planet with troops, you will always just be maintaining expensive garrisons in hostile territory. Successful diplomacy missions remove the need for garrisons, ends the threat of piracy and the like, and bulks defenses against the enemy’s secret incursions. However, they take up a hero’s valuable time – and like real diplomacy – run the risk of getting mired and having no effect. As said, defiant planets without enough garrison units will eventually go into uprising. Production shuts down, so the owner must allocate a large garrison and run special missions to stabilize the situation. Unchecked, the population will slowly kill every buildable unit on it, eject the recruitable heroes, and hand over all the facilities to the enemy.

The rest of the missions are pretty self-explanatory, with one operation often feeding into another. While some characters are just good soldiers, others are crucial to the success of either army. For example, new ships and war technology can only be researched by specific characters. If they’re out of the picture, then their benefactors are in trouble. It’s quite a rush to have one of your probes discover Bevel Lemelisk (the game takes many names and concepts from the Expanded Universe) doing ship research on a planet, send out a perfect mission to bag him, then drag his ass back to a planet you’ve fortified as a jail – knowing you’ve dealt a measurable blow to the enemy.

This is also where the Empire gets an advantage with Assassinations. A successful Assassination mission is the only way a hero can die, and only the Empire can run them. The Rebellion is stuck with prisoners that must be monitored – both sides can run context-sensitive Rescue missions once a prisoner is found. There are no jails to build or official ways to incarcerate someone you’ve captured, so you’re stuck plopping them on a highly-defended planet or capital ship where they will always, eventually, break out. Assassination missions have much less of a chance to succeed, but mean the Empire can pop a hero and be done with them forever – also adding some real tension to any Rebel player’s missions!

There’s a lot to enjoy about Rebellion, which is why its so frustrating when we get to the disappointing. First, the AI is pitiful, even on the hardest setting. It enjoys pumping out cheap ships that slot alone into sequentially-numbered fleets (signposting how many fleets are out there). Virtually any time they encounter any enemy ship, they will turn ass and flee. They never seem to organize themselves into numbers that would cause a threat, while the missions they run seem mostly reactionary. Just took over a planet? Well, here comes the Start Uprising mission.

Your own AI can be set to manage your garrisons or productions, and is barely capable of either. Expensive, overpowered troops get built and assigned to routine garrisons, while any available space is assigned to new mines or factories – regardless of if you need them or not, regardless of if you need the space for other production facilities. If you’ve designed a planet as your dedicated shipyard, the AI won’t take the hint and maintain it. If you’re measurably low on troops, the AI will instead blindly focus on gaining more production points without allocating them. If you’re seeing a theme here, it’s that planning is not the AI’s strength.

Let’s assume that you actually manage to hustle a pal to play against you in multiplayer, fixing the issue of dummy AI. You still have some rough design decisions to overcome. The game takes place in a sort-of real-time system, instead of purely turn-based. Pausing the game locks out all controls – so it’s definitely real-time – but activity won’t take place until the end of the day (a de-facto turn). Only when the next day ticks over will ships advance towards their destinations, resources be instantly mined and processed, construction tick closer to completion, and so on. You’re queuing up orders to take place the next day, while reacting to enemy events that happen all at once when the next day begins.

You’ll be swamped with tasks in the later game, while managing an entire galaxy becomes harder to keep track of. To attempt to offset this, your main galactic map screen has many options to highlight planets that meet specific factors. There’s a filter for planets with shipyards, or a filter for planets with idle production facilities, etc. They’re moderately helpful, but only one filter can be active at a time, and they don’t cover all the possibilities you would need, like a planet with weak defenses. You’ll almost have to keep separate notes to remember why you sent that fleet, finally arriving many weeks later, out in the first place.

Another painful design element is the interface itself. Your main screen is the entire galaxy, color-coded by faction ownership, with C-3PO or his evil double as your “assistants.” They, and your planets, harass you through an in-game email system. The messages are categorized among production, diplomacy, etc, but the more planets you get, the more messages you’ll be bombarded with throughout the game’s days. Again, you can’t pause game time to sort through them.

The main galaxy screen is divided into multiple sectors with ten planets each, and selecting a sector opens a slightly more detailed window of these planets. Selecting a planet opens up another window detailing what’s on or orbiting the planet. From there you get separate windows for fleets, garrisons, etc. Here’s the kicker – only two windows can be open at a time (to facilitate “trading” between the two). Clicking a new window replaces or removes the original. It’s like a DOS shell version of Windows, with extremely limited functionality.

You can fold up to 12 windows down to a taskbar on the side, allowing you quick access to those planets or fleets, but the two-active-window limit still applies. If you’re imagining moving windows around your galactic desktop and cascading them in order – forget it. Still, even if you could do this, it doesn’t change the fact that the entire game is played through static windows and popups. If you’re ready to let out a whoop and a cheer because a window has appeared telling you you’ve captured Darth Vader, you might like the game. If you require something a little more “immersive,” well, no.

Ground battles are invisible dice rolls, with few guarantees unless you stack the deck ridiculously in your favor. You can even the odds with pre-assault orbital bombings (usually at the cost of popular support), but there’s no other strategy. Once you think you’ve amassed a force worthy of the planet’s defenders, you simply click a “ground assault” selection and instantly receive the results of your attempt. If you’re familiar with the surprise victories of Risk, you’ll be familiar with how an overwhelming force of attackers can somehow be fought off by one defense unit with amazing rolls. The same applies here, but I guess heroes besting incredible odds is accurate to the series.

Space combat has the same option of pressing a button to get your results, or you can choose to take control of these battles as the commander. You will then be taken to a 3-D representation of space with some low-poly models for the ships of both sides. Your options here are rudimentary, basically consisting of ordering the fighters to attack fighters, and the capital ships to attack other capital ships. You can use waypoints to directly order movement, but there never seems to be a great reason to do this. You’re mostly babysitting the AI to concentrate effective fire on one target at a time. You’ll want to do this though, as the quick resolution option often hands victory over in situations where it makes no sense (3 corvettes and some X-Wings took down a Star Destroyer??)

Then there are the absolutely KILLER travel times. Sure, the ships have lightspeed, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re looking at months of travel before your ships reach their destinations. From one system to another across the galaxy – around 150 game days. It offers some strategic thinking, and pretty much nullifies the ability to play a reactionary game, but it’s still a hefty punch in the nose. In-system travel times are measured in days, which means you basically have to create self-sufficient systems, and can’t rely on a couple of powerhouse production facilities to supply your galactic army.

In the standard game, you must take over the enemy HQ to win (Coruscant for the Rebels, a mobile Rebel HQ for the Empire). The “full game” option requires you to also capture two leading heroes from the opposite side and hold them to win the game. This almost certainly ensures that you will have to capture the entire damn galaxy to win. Otherwise, the key heroes always have new places to hide, and it doesn’t do any damn good to get a message from your probe that someone important was spotted on Endor when it will then take 59 days for your strike team to get there.

You can build the Death Star as the Empire, but the requirements are are intentionally astronomical. One factory would take around 2800 days, assuming you even had the resources. You’re meant to build a planet full of shipyards (which grant stacking time-reduction bonuses), somehow keep it safe from the Rebels, and virtually shut down your other projects to get it built. When it’s finally done, you can, indeed, destroy planets – at the cost of every inhabited world in the galaxy immediately turning against you. Unless it’s the last blast taking out a fortified Rebel HQ, then it’s not worth it. It does offer a small bonus to planets’ loyalty when it’s in orbit, while its best use is in one-shotting the toughest Rebel capital ships. But overall, it’s just a big, expensive target.

As said, all victories come from overwhelming force and slowly taking over the whole galaxy. Games tend to end in abrupt cutscenes rather than dramatic final battles. Both times as the Empire, I systematically choked out any production the Rebels had and finally stumbled across the Rebel HQ hiding (undefended, as they couldn’t afford any units) in some corner of the galaxy. The same unarmed scout ship that found it was enough to take it out, so the ending cutscene just suddenly started up. As the Rebels, I had such a absurd force descending on Coruscant (plus Vader already captured) that victory was totally assured. The Emperor might as well have begrudgingly trudged out with arms raised for the shackles, muttering “sure, sure…”

Rebellion has some fantastic ideas, and one benefit of the Star Wars license is that it makes for a shorter learning curve than most similar games, if you’ve seen the movies. You’ll be more familiar with the tech and the terms. Still, the UI and complexity make it a tough game just to play (before you even think about winning). It’s the deepest Star Wars simulation yet made, but you’re going to need the mind of an accountant and the patience of Yoda to beat it.

 

The Good

Deep simulation, a number of neat ideas. True to the films. Detailed systems that aren’t overwhelmingly complex.

 

The Bad

Interface not very efficient, simple AI, entire game is essentially moving icons around. A whole galaxy to keep track of with little help. All victories pretty much the same. Played the entire game as both sides, and never once found the promised Rebel Lion.