Ophiuchus 0.3.2.1 review

Ophiuchus is a multiplayer strategy game in a similar vein as the Master of Orion series. Ophiuchus will go through many phases wher

License: Freeware File size: 43K Developer: David Stark

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Ophiuchus is a multiplayer strategy game in a similar vein as the Master of Orion series.

Ophiuchus will go through many phases where it is a completely playable game and it comes with further features added on with each major release.

The reason for this is that it is quite impossible for me to create a fully-featured game in one go. Doing it in steps allows me to re-check the game for gameplay quite often. (This also means I get to play it a lot, which serves to keep me interested.)

I aim to eventually create a game of rather large proportions, but this may well take some time. As such, I am concentrating on the gameplay of the game first, on the assumption that while graphics improve and change, gameplay stays eternal.

The game map is a rectangular board of tiles. A tile may contain a star. Each star is orbited by a single inhabitable planet. Each player starts out inhabiting a single planet, and owning 10 units of money.

Each planet a player owns adds 1 unit of money to their treasury per turn. You may build spaceships at your colonies, which cost 4 units of money, and take 1 turn to construct. Spaceships move across the map at a rate of 1 square per turn.

If a fleet encounters an uninhabited planet, it will automatically colonise the planet. If you encounter a planet owned by another player, you can attack and invade it. Combat works on the simple principle of winner-takes-all.

Whichever side has the larger fleet destroys the other side. If you retreat from combat, that is, if you order your fleet to leave a system while another player orders their fleet to attack yours, you lose a third of your ships.

You win the game by invading all colonies held by all other players.

What's New in This Release:
When multiple players arrive at the same uncolonized system at the same time, none of them can colonize the planet now.
Previously, the player with the lowest ID got the planet, leading to an advantage to players with lower IDs.
This was a problem especially in single player mode, when it gave a great advantage to the player over the computer.
Attack commands now always give feedback.