Slipways takes the space grand strategy genre and condenses the best parts of it down by throwing away all the micromanagement and the steep learning curve. The result is a unique blend of the strategy and puzzle genres in which you can finish a run quickly, but still have a deep experience full o...
Slipways takes the space grand strategy genre and condenses the best parts of it down by throwing away all the micromanagement and the steep learning curve. The result is a unique blend of the strategy and puzzle genres in which you can finish a run quickly, but still have a deep experience full of tough decisions.
MAKE TRADE, NOT WAR
Colonize planets, carefully pick industries and hook everything up so that your planets support each other. Line everything up just right and watch your colonies evolve and grow, giving you even more options for profitable trade. Make long-term plans and bask in your own glory when that one last connection makes six planets upgrade at the same time and gives you the income you desperately need.
There is no military aspect to pull your focus away from the economy. The game is more relaxed than your typical grand strategy. It's all about exploring space and its endless opportunities, shaping it to your whim and developing it to its full potential. No need for war with so much empty universe to claim.
FASTER THAN LIGHT
Forget about tedious micromanagement and waiting for ships to be built. In Slipways, every action you take has immediate consequences, and every choice you make is of paramount importance. Your planets govern themselves while you focus on making the right decisions to get them what they need. You'll waste none of your precious time on busywork. A single run takes 40-60 minutes and they are all filled with the good stuff.
TECH IT UP A NOTCH
There are no boring technologies here. Instead of making a single building 20% more efficient, technologies in Slipways let you move planets at will, harness stars for energy or colonize planets with sentient machines instead of people. The selection varies each run, so you'll have to plan carefully and adapt to the situation at hand. The path you choose will profoundly change your experience and the way you look at the game's planets and resources.
...ONE MORE GAME?
When a single run takes no more than an hour, what you need is replayability. Almost everything in Slipways is procedurally generated and each sector of the galaxy offers wildly different challenges. To overcome these challenges, you'll enlist the help of the five races populating the empire, each with their own philosophical outlook, varied abilities and a dedicated slice of the technology tree. There are more than 80 technologies to choose from and you'll only be using about 10 of them each run. No two games are ever exactly alike.
PLAY IT YOUR WAY
The standard gameplay mode gives you 25 years to build the best empire you can, but there are others. The endless mode lets you play for as long as you can hold on to power, the sandbox mode allows you to experiment freely, while the ranked run is a chance to measure your skills against others around the world on pre-seeded maps.
The game will also feature a campaign mode, with each scenario introducing a new twist and refreshing the gameplay: supernovae that have to be tamed or avoided, sectors with completely new resources to be mined, a dense nebula impeding your progress. On launch day, there will only be a few scenarios to explore, but their number will increase over time as free updates are released. The new mechanics introduced in the campaign will also feature in other modes, becoming new options for even more varied runs.
Popular achievements
Don't Spend It All in One Place
Reach an income of 120$ per year at any point in a standard run.
common
·
38.33%
Spreading Sentience
Colonize 100 planets across all your games.
common
·
35.24%
System requirements
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Why buy on GOG.COM?
DRM FREE. No activation or online connection required to play.
Not a bad game, but heavy on RNG.
Full puzzle, not much "stratergy".
Little assemblence of "learn as you go" due to the RNG down to even the race selections research options.
Not even a quick restart option...
"Slipways" is simple and addictive blend of strategy game and puzzle. It's one of those "easy to play, hard to master" games where you expand your empire through colonization and trade (there is no war aspect in game). One thing that bugs me is randomness: maybe I'm just unlucky, but for most of my campaigns I had almost none compatible planets, wchich made my game harder, even on normal difficulty. But otherwise, game is perfect and for that price, it's a steal!
Slipways is the kind of game you can play any way you want. You can ignore the score, relax while listening to an amazing soundtrack, colonize planets, grow your network and watch the grass grow.
Or you can really take every turn carefully, understand how you can master the (ever chaning) tech tree, and go for the highest score. With almost endless replayability, this game is a must play for anyone interested in strategy who might also want to play a game to chill every now and then.
The core concept of Slipways is building a transportation network: connecting nodes to fill supply and demand. Think of it as a Railroad game (e.g. Railroad tycoon), except...
However, your entire success or not in a scenario -- especially when attempting the campaigns -- is dependent on RNG. Sometimes you'll get a map without useful resources near each other. Or you'll need an objective to have highly successful node (those that make a lot of trades) nearby, but they can't be promoted because compatible resources are simply not nearby.
And this is also where the Railroad metaphor falls apart. Goods will not travel more than one node. And you cannot have intersecting or crossing tracks. Even if you get "relay points", they're just used to lengthen a path; still no crossing.
A lot of this might be mitigated if the "relay points" (and related techs) were available early (rather than half-way down the tech tree, and only sometimes!) so you could actually use strategy.
A perfect example is the 4th campaign scenario where you have to research time rifts: The time rifts occupy space (so you can't have paths cross them), significantly destroying paths you could make. To research a rift, you must connect it to a lab, and a person. (And labs need a person, and a raw resource). You need 70 rift points to pass. A rift lab only generates one per year. And you have 25 years. To have it generate two, it needs extra people and TWO extra research. And to make a lab generate multiple research requires multiple people, and lots of spare resources all of the same type, in a tight area. With no crossing paths.
And don't think about building multiple labs. Each rift can only support one research point. Also, you can effectively only build one lab for each of the game's 7 raw resources, since researching the same thing multiple times cuts its almost to zero.
All the while you have to make sure your networks fulfill basic demands or the game ends early.
Sadly, this is an avoid.
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