Neptunes Pride - Galactic War in a Persistent Online World

Neptune's Pride is multiplayer strategy game set in a persistent online world, a single game will generally take in the region of 2-6 weeks. I played a game that lasted just over 2 weeks and finished at the end of last week so after taking some time to gather my thoughts I figured I'd share them. The game has a set of starting resources for each player: Economy, Industry and Science. Economy produces credits which in turn can be used to buy upgrades for your stars, Industry produces ships, although you'll need to pay for a super carrier to travel between worlds, and Science develops better, more powerful technologies. That's essentially the entire game- no ship classes, no population, no space stations.

In a confrontation a defender has initiative and +1 to their weapon skill which makes it difficult to defeat even weaker players who have stockpiled sleets at a few key worlds. The game removes much of what's expected from modern strategy games to provide a simple game that forces strategic thinking and player collaboration. Initially the game can be slow moving due to a lack of starting resources but factions seem to reach a critical mass after 3 or 4 days when they start having enough resources to test their neighbors and explore further from their space. After the first week players are at each others throats; forming alliances, attacking nearby stars and trading technologies.

In the game I played the map was a spiral galaxy with 8 players which was good and bad- it was perfectly balanced as everyone has the same relative positions, however this had the effect of creating an initial stalemate as no one was backed in a corner or had fewer resources than others. We had 2 players that were less active than the rest which was a big obstacle in the end due to the sheer amount of ships built up on their homeworlds. Myself and the blue player took the initial lead and vied for first place for most of the game, despite my larger fleets. In the end it was the two of us left but he was expanding at a faster rate, he almost had it won until I launched the attack shown below which he couldn't manage to repel. It took a day from launching the attach to winning, we were both quite closely matched so launching that attack allowed me to grab victory from the jaws of defeat. Overall the game allows for a lot of strategy given a simple set of rules, however it can feel slow at the start. Its a great game to play with your friends- especially when you wake up in the morning to find that you've been double crossed and you must now exact your revenge. A few of us agreed to play in a few weeks and a few more friends who had been following along with the game said they'd join in next time too which is a great sign of the game, I'm looking forward to it!