Space Colony Preview

What happens when you take a bunch of unruly people and lock them in a cabin in the woods? They get cabin fever. And what happens when you take a bunch of unruly people and lock them in a futuristic space station? You get Space Colony, the upcoming strategy game from developer Firefly Studios, the creator of Stronghold and Stronghold: Crusader. In Space Colony, you'll manage a mining settlement populated by a ragtag bunch of misfits with differing personalities and agendas, and you'll have to get them to put aside their differences and work together--otherwise, you'll never get off the stinking rock you're on.

The game's lead character is Venus Jones, a veteran miner who needs to set up just one more good mining operation before she can finally retire. As you might expect, that's not going to happen anytime soon, since her megalomaniacal boss, President Waterhouse (who bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Burns from The Simpsons), won't get off her case until she can whip a team of expert (and not-so-expert) miners into shape. The game will have about 20 of these colorful characters, who resemble the cast members of sci-fi TV series such as Red Dwarf or Farscape, including the rough-and-tumble space biker Stig, the rowdy 40-year-old barfly Tami, the wannabe tough guy Dean (whose Rastafarian fashion sense does little to cover the mannerisms he picked up at Harvard), and Mr. Zhang, a grumpy old man with a gift for building useful androids.

Like in Maxis' wildly popular life-simulator series The Sims, one of your primary goals is to keep your crew happy. That's because when they're happier, they'll put in longer hours and be more productive, and when they're more productive, you'll be closer to Venus' goal of finally getting out of the mining business. To keep your crew working together, you'll need to account for their differences. For example, you'll need to make sure that friendly miners, such as the inseparable Japanese punk-rock duo of Nikita and Hoshi, work together, and you'll need to separate miners who aren't getting along--if the rowdy Tami starts pushing people around, you may have to buy a virtual detainment unit for your space station and throw her in the clink until she cools down. And if you have miners with continual problems, you may want to purchase a counseling pod (complete with robo-Freud therapist) and have them spend some time on the couch. In the meantime, you'll also want to keep an eye on your miners' general needs, such as health, hunger, fatigue, hygiene, and social interaction, which all affect a miner's happiness meter. If your colony is covered with trash and has nowhere to eat, your miners will become morose and unproductive.

Interestingly, you may be required to keep certain mission-critical miners happy and hardworking in some of the game's 24 single-player campaign scenarios. To keep the team's spirits up, you might invest in a disco floor (which makes just about everyone slightly happier and can also help fulfill social needs for lonely miners), a zero-gravity free-fall chamber for more-adventurous miners, or even a golf course (once you have the technology to create vegetation on distant planets). You can also build a knowledge library to train your miners in various skills, though the longer they train, the longer they'll be out of commission and not earning you cash, which you'll need to create larger stations in the later missions, including an interstellar resort and an alien zoo full of bizarre critters for tourists to gawk at. You won't be able to control what tourists do, though you can at least provide them with amenities like food dispensers and diversions like slot machines so they'll empty their pockets for you--just make sure they don't clutter up the place with trash or use up your supply of oxygen. In the meantime, you'll need to monitor your miners and other operations. Of course, Space Colony's miners will be very chatty, and if they're happy or unhappy about anything, they'll let you know.

The game will even have some combat elements, though much like in Firefly's Stronghold games, these elements will emphasize base defense over sallying forth and waging war on a battlefield. Specifically, at a certain points in the game, Venus will be offered a promotion that may send her into hostile territory. If she accepts the promotion, she'll need to build a colony surrounded by perimeter defenses, including force fields and laser cannons to ward off pesky hostile aliens. These creatures won't be as terrifying or malicious as those in the film Aliens, though. Instead, they'll be a motley assortment of bizarre creatures that might resemble something from the earlier episodes of the original Star Trek TV series.

Space Colony will be a pretty considerable departure from Firefly's previous work with the Stronghold series, but its combination of city building, character interaction, and tongue-in-cheek humor may very well appeal to anyone looking for a futuristic game that doesn't involve blasting aliens to kingdom come. Space Colony is scheduled for release this September.