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[Dune: Spice Wars] - Walk without rhythm, you won't attract the worm
Cantido
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
https://youtu.be/b57ldtxl7tMShiro Games, developers of the award winning Northgard, have applied their 4X/RTS hybrid formula to the Dune IP. It feels like Northgard meets Stellaris. Both are real time 4Xs.
https://youtu.be/7376eMR88NMHow it resembles Northgard: Same cartoony aesthetics, frantic economic plate-spinning, and score-based victory condition. Everything players create consumes a spread of resources that must be managed evenly (and there are many.) Spice creates Solari (money) and keeps the Emperor from laying down harsh penalties. Water maintains villages and allows for personnel. Troops not in their own territory drain their Supplies meter. Plastcrete is your building material. And lastly, Hedgemony, which is victory points. Maps are still broken up into provinces which can be claimed and have unique resource producing bonuses and hazards.
How it resembles Stellaris: Dune is slow burning. Players will need to get comfortable using the feature that speeds up time. Factions are very unique and have different characteristics, play styles and different approaches to diplomacy. The Landsraad serves as an equivalent to the Galactic Council, and is always available without the need to unlock access. Every few days, three laws are proposed and players can vote while spending their Influence to increase their voting power. Influence can also peacefully annex villages. Inter-faction negotiations are possible.
Overall, I'm delighted and intimidated, and am looking forward to what the future brings for this game. I also speculate there will be a mobile version, like Northgard before it.
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Because it's Dune, let's be honest. I'm not sure I would be as interested if it wasn't Dune.
The factions are both unique and not.
Fremen are the most obvious with their lack of miners getting wormed, riding worms instead of shuttles and ease of allying with the locals.
Smugglers are stealthy parasite profiteers with their underworld cities that can leach off your neighbors and a fair amount of units with stealth.
Atredies and Harkonnen though are pretty similiar, with the former being more defensive and ranged focused while the latter offensive and melee focused. Atredies peaceful take over from basically anywhere on the map is interesting in theory but usually means they'll snipe areas they have no business defending and thus just up the hostility. Harkonen press the oppression button to make the spice flow go brrrrrr.
I'm still unconvinced that the AI at least on even medium isn't a cheating bastard because of the waves of army forces they can send at you despite their meager holdings. The main reason my smuggler run is doing so well is cause the forces the Harkonnens sent my way got stuck attacking my capital that they had no chance against, shaving off one pip of health.
Also took a few games to realize there is a pause button (default space bar). God that helped to read all the info to try to parse out what I'm doing. Still don't know how to reliably increase my Landsraad standing though.
Most delicious thing is the Dune purists being pissed at Liet Kynes matching the 2021 movie and raging that dune is RUINED.
I think multiplayer is going to give this game even more legs.
Edit: Manpower seems like a huge issue as well. Recruitment centers and military tech/buildings will only get you so far and so allying with +manpower fremen is almost a must. Speaking of Fremen, is there any reason to attack them? They just seemed to respawn afterwards the one time I did, easier to just get the bonus and fend off the raids.
Still expensive but now I'm the one sending an army on your doorstep, filthy Harkonnens.
*Defeats enemy forces but dies to sandstorm while liberating the city*
That's enough spicey wars for now...
Edit: Hmm maybe everyone can get mercs at 10k heg which is good.
"What, another sandworm warning? Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm almost done mopping up this city---"
*Harvester ded, Solari in the red*
"Oh shit."
Also, always always always put your miners on auto-recall. So what it's a -5% hit, since you should always be putting in full crew you're going to be losing 50 - 200 manpower if that ever gets eaten and that's just too huge a setback.
Right now, the voting stuff and descriptions seems an entirely opaque and useless process.
There are two notifications for a vote, the first is the upcoming vote topics, this is also the time to use any powers related to the upcoming vote (corruption, bounties, unrest).
The second is the actual vote, there you will see if it affects everyone (options for that vote are accept or decline) or a specific faction (allows to select a target or decline). By alloting your votes, you are saying whether you support or decline a decision for all or selecting a faction to get an effect/declining.
Number of votes is based on your Landsraad standing: Atredies starts with 100, Harkonnen with 80 to start, Smugglers eventually get 50. Votes based on standing are renewed for each vote. Votes can be boosted with influence which is consumed after the vote. The wild card is the minor houses with a collective 400 votes they might through any which way.
After voting, it'll say what passed and who it affected. If just a general accepted then everyone gets the effect. If it labels a specific faction, only that faction gets it.
I will guarantee I am a bigger Dune purist/nerd than any of them, and no, Kynes was fine in the 2021 movie; they're just jerks.
Whereas with Fremen I was having next to no issues with resources and moving at a good clip fairly early on.
I'll say the AI needs some tweaking as my ~85 "buddy" Smugglers attacked one of my spice production bases to take it over and then relations went to -100 cause I dared defend myself. I ended up burning their capital to the ground but Atredies was being weird Atredies and hadn't really spread out that much. While they had a pretty big border with the Harkonnens, there was just this huge chunk in the south east that Atredies and Smugglers didn't touch. Also intel operations can just absolutely wreck the AI, Supply Drop and Gear Sabotage can help you hold a lot of stuff though I have had computer accidently counter with Poisoned Reserves to stop the regeneration from Supplies.
I will say I was suddenly shocked to be up for election for Governship of Dune, didn't think I qualified or the other Charters had to be taken up first. Unsure! Still lots to dig in to but I'll give it a lil break.
A few pictures I've taken, spoilered for big
Woe, I thought that was more of a movie complaint. Oh well, gamers can be shitty too.
I see a lot more purists complaining about Dune: Spice Wars not being Dune 2000.
Pfft. If people want to be purist about Dune games, they should be complaining it's not like Cryo's Dune. The superior Dune game (so far).
So the first part of the voting cycle is influencing what the vote does, but the second part is voting on who the resolution effects? Is that right?
The first part is advertising what's coming up and put on hidden riders such as the Fremen Inssurection/Revolt ability. At the cost of authority, I chose one of the resolutions I was allowed to (still a little iffy on which ones quality), causing whoever won that vote would be hit with a revolt in a random village (pretty sure I was immune though), but I could not spend any votes on that resolution.
The second part is the actual vote occurs, which will allow you select a target such as +30 Plascreet Upkeep and then assign votes to it if you so wish, or will just be a general Accept/Decline.
Will do pictures if this is still confusing. I wish it was clearer.
I think some more visual style, more incorporation of Dune elements like the worms and politicking for Fremen and such, and better diplomacy options would really help it, but I think an expansion of mechanics and features is almost guaranteed
I'm very curious how they take this going forward
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
On a flavor level I wish they’d have made up a house for the third faction. “Smugglers” is a fairly boring invention.
Yeah there’s three speed settings and a pause
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Dune: Spice Wars leans into both Northgard and Stellaris.. Its much slower burning than Northgard and you will want to get comfortable using the Fast Forward until a sandworm alarm goes off.
I'm guessing they are a stand-in for House Ordos. I seem to recall them being stranded in IP hell, and effectively dead for any future games.
Hopefully the game will allow some mods at one point, so someone better than me can make an Ordos conversion.
.
Island. Being on fire.
I personally would have made the smugglers another house faction and let smugglers act like a random AI faction on the map like the Fremen.
The Fremen units need to be labeled and changed because they are basically militia when they should be more capable
Smugglers were the trickiest to get a handle on; their play style has the potential to be wildly different since such a huge part of what they do is set up shop in enemy cities instead of needing their own. Accordingly, I suspect the Smugglers might be the best (only?) faction to go “vertical” with; to maintain a small, extremely efficient territory instead of painting the whole map blue. (The limit on the number of buildings in a city makes that feel like kind of a non-starter for the other factions.)
I also like that it’s Tuek and his ilk instead of House Ordos; Ordos feels like it would take up a lot of mechanical space better served by including Ix and the Bene Tleilaxu. Northgard expanded over time to have something like a dozen factions, so we may eventually see them here. The game code already has unused advisors for House Corrino, so Shaddam IV is definitely on the way. (This might explain why the Imperial troops you can hire via the Council are “Landsraad Guards”: the Sardaukar are spoken for by the fifth-faction-in-progress.)
The Fremen are absurdly good; worm riding is so much more versatile than shuttling armies about, allying with sietches outside your territory gives visibility into enemy territory (fittingly, the Smugglers are even better at this, but still), and a Fedaykin with operational support can wipe out any non-veteran militia garrisons alone.
The Atreides… could use a little juice, I think. Being able to absorb territory sans military conflict is cool, but it takes so long that you’re often better off doing it the old-fashioned way. I guess the ability regains a little utility in the mid-game if you want to take multiple territories concurrently, aren’t finding your amount of Authority to be a meaningful restriction, and can afford to wait without your economy coming apart at the seams. Their Landsraad stuff is great, though. The Governorship is basically a victory condition that the Atredies specifically must be prevented from achieving by the other players. My first game as the Smugglers ended with me frantically hacking away at an upgraded Arrakeen while the governorship clock ticked down. I did not win.
Hegemony.
Its your score and everything you do makes it go up, offering flexibility in win conditions.
That’s the one. What are some decent ways to make it go up?
I feel like I was making a lot of bank but not necessarily having Hegemony tick up at a rate comparable to how well I felt like I was doing.
There are buildings that make it tick up at a regular rate, regions you can capture that give big hegemony bonuses
The major thing I think makes it go up is capturing villages
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
While there are general ways to make it go up (capturing villages, defeating enemy units, paying spice tax, etc) there are some unique ways for each faction to make it go up.
Smugglers get hegemony from pillaging villages.
Fremen get hegemony from producing water.
Harkonnen get hegemony when they spend intel on operations (when the operation is actually executed, not the initial operation development)
Atredies get it when...umm...*boots up an Atredies game*...hegemony for supported resolution passed, of course.
It'll help generate towards those hegemony thresholds early on which are useful for sure, but hegemony is also the default victory condition so there are all sorts of ways to generate.
Also coming back to the Mercenaries I found so useful in my Smuggler game that I ended up abandoning: Smugglers get them for their 10k Hegemony but any faction can end up recruiting them if they research the bottom right Economic tech tree. Honestly it always seems worth it because they train so fast and only cost solaris and military points. They won't beat elite troops in a fair fight but you can just swarm the battlefield in bodies.
I suspect that starting position is random and not a function of difficulty level, but getting started this time was absolute hell; the village in the region with the closest spice field was literally too far from Carthag to take, and the adjacent region with the nearest village had some damn inconvenient cliffs. I had to depend entirely on ’thopter discoveries to meet the first spice quota, and still hadn’t even taken the region and started gathering by the time the deadline hit.
What I do suspect increased as a function of game difficulty is that the AI became more aggressive with their operations. It’s possible that multiple AI players also coordinated their operations, but I suspect that it was just a coincidence of their resources ticking up at the same rate and hitting the same IF THEN statement at the same time. But either way, getting hit with multiple simultaneous rebellions in areas that aren’t typical “hot spots” (read: borders and raid targets)—and therefore probably don’t have direct shuttle access—is an absolute bear to deal with. Militia and missile turrets simply don’t respond to rebellions (but nor are they the ones rebelling, so what the hell?), so you have to divide and devote your standing forces to the problems.
After the first time this happened, my instinct for dealing with it was to make sure to devote agents to Counter-Intelligence (which wasn’t really necessary on Easy). I figured that agents are a finite resource: if you capture enough of them, you should be able to keep the enemy’s infiltration levels too low to hit you with the really damaging stuff. However, it seems that, regardless of your Counter-Intelligence level, all enemy agents eventually escape anyway. So really, captured agents are only valuable as a trade resource, one that you simply lose if you let ’em sit too long. I have five other resources I can trade, so investing my own agents in Counter-Intelligence still doesn’t feel worth it to me.
It makes me think that being able to execute enemy agents my be a nice little perk for some future faction. It doesn’t feel particularly like Corrino… But maybe the Bene Tleilaxu could kill take away (read: execute and make a ghola of) agents that come after them?
As for agents, they're too useful a resource to be able to just sit on forever. If you executed/imprisoned them forever then the timer would just go up for them to have a new one. It's important and debilitating to lose an agent but to lose them for the rest of the game would be outright crippling and would just incentivize counter-intelligence until you're the only one with agents left.
I mean, presumably they would stop targeting you and go after somebody else well before that happened, but I take your point that making seizure permanent switches Counter-Intelligence from feeling useless to feeling too good.
Whoops I’ve been playing my Smugglers as Harkonnen in that case. I went heavy into spying thinking that seemed like something criminals would do. Barely raided either.
If the missile battery is in a neighboring village I've had them rain death while I try to get there. Same for AI, may be a bug but unknown.
And yeah, it's a fine balance on the Counter-Intelligence because you want operative missions to be useful but need some sort of counter play otherwise it's too OP, but same at shutting it down. I have no good answer on how to properly balance it.
Edit: Also they need to really up the indication that a worm is in the area/about to attack. I've had the vibrating sand animation cease so I think it's fine to pursue the enemy forces only to get swallowed by a worm.
I can’t say that I’ve had a problem with it for awhile, but it’s definitely an effect that seems to be at the whim of your graphics settings, which is more ambiguous than something so important should be. That said, I’ve been zooming way in to be sure the “worm sign” effect is gone as a matter of forced habit, because when they go after Harvesters, the don’t hang around for a consistent amount of time… and the “Deploy” button on the Harvester doesn’t give a shit if the worm is actually gone or not.
I don’t mind this particular bit of busy-work-style gameplay; it’s flavorful as hell. But it took me a while to figure out why I was occasionally (like, at least half a dozen times) losing Harvesters I was sure I’d set to automatically evacuate: it was because I was using my Carryalls as Door Dash for Shai Hulud, delivering Harvesters directly into His waiting maw.
Ah, well. Bless His coming and His going, I guess.
It can be absurdly powerful used right.
Oh, I think there’s a pretty reliable counter available: the “Supply Drop” operation, which can be used by anyone (and is cheaper, I think). Supply Drop gradually heals and resupplies your own troops long enough for “Combat Drugs” to wear off, at which point your Harkonnen foes will all technically be alive, but with 1 hit point apiece, and any troops you have that are still standing will wipe ’em out immediately.
Honestly, I always try to keep a “Supply Drop” operation ready to go, for when a fight look likes it’s about to turn nasty. It’s not gonna completely flip a fight like “Combat Drugs” does, but it’s the sort of edge that can turn a narrow loss into a narrow win or—in cases like this one—keep a fight from being flipped against you.