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[Neptune's Pride II: Triton] When galactic conquest, politics, and personal drama combine!
Henroid
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Iron Helmet Games has done something terrible; they made Neptune's Pride 2. And when I say terrible, I mean the good kind of terrible where people who enjoy brutality in games or losing their life to a game can have their fill. The game is currently in pre-release, it's not a finished product just yet (be it bugs or possibly game changes, who can say). It will always be a free game but the payment details are below.
Let me start this out properly and explain the first game, tucked into the spoiler tag below. If you know it though, continue beyond that!
What is Neptune's Pride?
Neptune's Pride is a 4x flash-based game of conquest. In real time, whether you are paying attention to the game or not, you and a dozen other players are trying to take over a galaxy. You do this by generating ships (automatically) at stars you claim, and using carriers to move those ships around to defend or attack. You can research technologies to give yourself various advantages, trade with other players, and form allegiances with them if you see fit. You can also get very meta with the game and backstab your allies - afterall, you want to win right? The goal is a certain amount of stars within the galaxy claimed as your own.
What does it cost?
Neptune's Pride is actually free. You can join public or private games (up to two at max, if I remember right) with just your Google account. But there are paid functions, which comes in the form of coins. These coins really just go to serve one purpose; joining private games (the exception being... well, keep reading), or starting a private game for more coins and thus being able to invite people (for free, to them). I bought a coin pack long ago and was able to start a game and nobody else had to pay for it. That's it. No paying to win. The advantage of starting a private game is modifying various aspects of the game before it begins, and even choosing from some specific galaxy layouts, like these two examples:
This game plays in real time?
From the moment the final player joins, Neptune's Pride begins, whether you have the game site loaded or not. Things occur in real time, and are slow to start at first. When you plan a flightpath for a ship and its ETA reads 12 hours, that's 12 of our earth hours, on the reals. As boring as that sounds, by the end of the week things will be picking up at a pace where you'll want to be interacting with the game as much as possible, as the small starting positions grow into empires creating constant border conflicts. An example of pacing is below:
Game Terms and Functions You Need to Know
I'm going to try and be brief and concise here. If you see dollar signs, it's in-game money, not real money.
Stars can have Economy, Industry, and Science built at their location. The more resources a Star has, the less these things cost to build. Economy causes money to be generated once a day per total points you have across all stars. Industry causes ships to build at the star and only that star. Science comes together across all stars at once to go toward your research.
The following can be researched: Weapons, Scanning, Speed, and Range. Weapons increase your ships' strength. Scanning increases the distance you can view details of the galaxy at, be it information of stars or carrier movement. Range increases the distance carriers can travel in a single jump. Speed makes carriers go faster (you can never reduce the pre-jump 30 minute timer though; all jumps have a 30-minute primer, once gone by, you can't reverse orders).
Carriers are built at stars for $25 a piece. You can move ships to and from stars to and from your carriers. Garrisons on stars lock a number of ships to a star so that carriers don't pick them up automatically and take them away. Combat is handled automatically. Defenders get a bonus, equal to +1 weapons research than normal.
Neptune's Pride is a 4x flash-based game of conquest. In real time, whether you are paying attention to the game or not, you and a dozen other players are trying to take over a galaxy. You do this by generating ships (automatically) at stars you claim, and using carriers to move those ships around to defend or attack. You can research technologies to give yourself various advantages, trade with other players, and form allegiances with them if you see fit. You can also get very meta with the game and backstab your allies - afterall, you want to win right? The goal is a certain amount of stars within the galaxy claimed as your own.
What does it cost?
Neptune's Pride is actually free. You can join public or private games (up to two at max, if I remember right) with just your Google account. But there are paid functions, which comes in the form of coins. These coins really just go to serve one purpose; joining private games (the exception being... well, keep reading), or starting a private game for more coins and thus being able to invite people (for free, to them). I bought a coin pack long ago and was able to start a game and nobody else had to pay for it. That's it. No paying to win. The advantage of starting a private game is modifying various aspects of the game before it begins, and even choosing from some specific galaxy layouts, like these two examples:
This game plays in real time?
From the moment the final player joins, Neptune's Pride begins, whether you have the game site loaded or not. Things occur in real time, and are slow to start at first. When you plan a flightpath for a ship and its ETA reads 12 hours, that's 12 of our earth hours, on the reals. As boring as that sounds, by the end of the week things will be picking up at a pace where you'll want to be interacting with the game as much as possible, as the small starting positions grow into empires creating constant border conflicts. An example of pacing is below:
Basically you'll go from this:
To this several days later:
To this again a few days later:
To this several days later:
To this again a few days later:
Game Terms and Functions You Need to Know
I'm going to try and be brief and concise here. If you see dollar signs, it's in-game money, not real money.
Stars can have Economy, Industry, and Science built at their location. The more resources a Star has, the less these things cost to build. Economy causes money to be generated once a day per total points you have across all stars. Industry causes ships to build at the star and only that star. Science comes together across all stars at once to go toward your research.
The following can be researched: Weapons, Scanning, Speed, and Range. Weapons increase your ships' strength. Scanning increases the distance you can view details of the galaxy at, be it information of stars or carrier movement. Range increases the distance carriers can travel in a single jump. Speed makes carriers go faster (you can never reduce the pre-jump 30 minute timer though; all jumps have a 30-minute primer, once gone by, you can't reverse orders).
Carriers are built at stars for $25 a piece. You can move ships to and from stars to and from your carriers. Garrisons on stars lock a number of ships to a star so that carriers don't pick them up automatically and take them away. Combat is handled automatically. Defenders get a bonus, equal to +1 weapons research than normal.
What's different between the first game and Triton?
Functionally and thematically the games are pretty much the same with few changes.
- The biggest change is that Triton is coded in HTML5 instead of Flash. This changes the metagame, because people can play it from their smartphones instead of having to be at a proper computer. Now you can know true terror as people make moves in the game while they're living their life normally - at work, on a date, at a stop light or other traffic stop, etc.
- Speed research has been removed. This is the biggest change, pure gameplay-wise.
- To accommodate that aspect of the game strategy (speed), a new function has been applied to stars - building Warp Gates. When two stars both have gates, the travel speed between them is tripled.
- New research options were added.
- Terraforming - Increases the resources at all stars.
- Banking - Increase the money generated of all your economic structures.
- Manufacturing - Increase the output of all your industry (ship production).
- General Research - A new option that generates more research XP over time, but assigns it randomly across all fields.
- Instead of getting assigned any ol' alien portrait as you join games, you can now just pick one to associate with your account. Free players have less choices. This is just an icon, no function.
Triton's payment options!
The game is still free. Instead of buying coins to start private games though, you now have two subscription plans available. 3 months for $12 and 12 months for $24. There's also the Lifetime Plan, a one-time payment of $48. And they make special note that when the day comes that their servers have to shut down, they will open source it so that you can host it yourself. Now THAT is rad.
The other benefits are the same. You can play as many games as you want simultaneously, create games as you please, that sorta stuff. Though there's also more portraits available if you're premium (just cosmetic though, remember!).
Willing Penny Arcade Forumers
This space will eventually be a list of people on the forum who step up and say "yes please" to playing this game (or the first) with other forumers. As it stands I have plenty of credits for more games of the original Neptune's Pride, so the OP can now end with, "Who wants to get wrecked?"
+1
Posts
Okay atleast there's the phone thing.
But I'll be checking it sixty times an hour.
I'm already in. It's got its hooks in me already.
Will re-consider my position tomorrow. :P
Like I said in the OP I have credits for the first game and can start things up there. I'm not gonna start it until we have enough people standing up to play though. My only rule for games I start is that official alliances will be turned off. The only way I'll agree to official alliances is if we establish teams before registering the game, because the official, actual alliance function easily creates situations of 5 v 3 or some shit. It's dumb. It also removes the intrigue of the game I feel, when it comes to cultivating alliances.
Oh yeah. This is all about diplomatic trickery.
I'm in.
You're very right. Although I already made a truce/border agreement with my two newbie neighbours, so I'm feeling a false sense of security right now.
And so are they.
Exactly.
I guess I was wrong about the 'bug' I thought I found, the button just doesn't un-highlight like everything else when you're out of funds. My current game (which is my trial to see the flow of NP2) just had its first cycle complete, watching how everyone develops their shit. I thought one of the players was dormant, but then he suddenly expanded his industry a lot. So he's playing an interesting strategy.