Star Wolves 3: Civil War

INTRO:

Space can be quite fascinating to some, even if they do not have the means to reach it physically. What they can do, however, is use their imagination. In the case of game designers, they express their idea on what space is, and more importantly, what space would be like through their games.

However, even in the endeavour of turning imagination into something that others can partake in, reality can rear its ugly head. In the case of game designers like the now-defunct X-bow Software, that dream came falling down to Earth, mainly due to its ineptitude at building on what the first Star Wolves title did despite the seemingly novel ideas for the second title.

The second title was poorly received by people who liked the first, mainly due to how the game was unsatisfactorily short and not engaging. The purported reason for this was that key personnel who worked on the first title had left to form another game company – specifically Ino-Co, which would later become known as the 1C Company, a software company with particular clout in the Russian market.

Fortunately, the Star Wolves IP had not been forgotten by 1C. Star Wolves 3: Civil War (marketed outside of Russia as Star Wolves 2: Civil War) is the third iteration in the series, made by a developer called “Elite Games Team”, which is supposedly an independent developer according to unverified sources.

Yet, it has to be mentioned here that many of the gameplay designs in the third entry had already been done (if not well-implemented) in the flawed second game. It also retains a lot of the problems which plagued the earlier games.

PREMISE:

Space is full of promise and chaos. This is what the Star Wolves IP envisions it to be; humanity expands out into space in search of adventure, wealth, knowledge and many other things, but the distance which humanity’s various individuals and groups put between each other invariably results in the absence of any sense of shared destiny.

By the time of the events in Star Wolves 3 (which appears to disregard the events in the second game and is instead the sequel to a fan-made mod for the first game), the known galaxy is now divided into several factions, most of which have tense relationships with each other.

There is the Old Empire with its often brutal MSF Imperial forces, the fledgling New Empire which is learning the hard way to do unsavory things to survive despite its good intentions, three mega-corporations which prefer to maintain their own sovereignty and other groups, such as opportunistic pirates and mercenaries who hire themselves out for all kinds of work. Then there are aliens and rogue AI too.

It is into this setting that the player character is thrust into. The player character is a merchant and a member of the Free Trade Union, which has taken advantage of the tense situation in the known galaxy to make themselves out as neutral businesspersons. The player character so happened to be quite a successful one too, until a major shipping venture turned out disastrous.

Almost bankrupted by the ordeal, the player character (an apparently young ethnic Russian male) has vowed to investigate the events which led to the disaster. Unfortunately, he will learn that there are many things which are not within his control, but being ever the resourceful person, there is always an opportunity to be had from any scenario.

LIMITED RESOLUTION OPTIONS & IFFY WINDOWED MODE:

Unfortunately, Star Wolves 3 just has to make a poor first impression about its technical designs. This is caused by its rather limited options for screen resolutions. In particular, the height rating for the screen resolution cannot go below 768 pixels. Furthermore, in windowed mode, changes to screen resolutions will not occur until the game is re-launched.

The windowed mode also imposes partial locking of the mouse cursor, which neither satisfactorily contains the cursor within the window nor allows the player to move the mouse cursor outside of the window.

NOTICEABLE REFERENCES TO INO-CO:

It is not rare for game-makers to inject some fictitious representation of themselves into their own games. In the case of this one, there is a corporation in the story that is called “InoCo” – an obvious reference to 1C Company’s origins.

However, instead of being something in the backstory, InoCo is apparently a major faction; it is the most technologically advanced of the three major corporations. Furthermore, in the narrative, it had a history of surprisingly beneficent acts, such as communicating with angry aliens to broker a ceasefire and equipping border patrols with state-of-the-art weaponry.

This may seem to be a harmless self-referential shenanigan of course, but cynical players might see this as self-aggrandizement.

READ THE MANUAL:

It is advisable to read the manual, mainly because the tutorials and in-game documentation are quite lacking. Unfortunately, the manual is not exactly well-collated, as will be explained where relevant later.

TUTORIAL:

Even though Star Wolves 3 came from an intellectual pedigree that is far from as prominent as the likes of Homeworld, it is still a rather complex game, especially if one is to compare it to other games with space sci-fi settings but which simplifies space into a 2D plane. Therefore, there is a tutorial in the game for the sake of players who are completely clueless about (fictitious) movement in space.

Speaking of which, the tutorial covers the controlling of strike-craft in space and the formation of teams of strike-craft, as well as how the player can enable their special abilities so that a formation becomes greater than the sum of its parts. (It is worth noting here that the manual states that the player will get to learn about the Mothership gameplay element too, but this is not the case.)

Unfortunately, the tutorial has lessons which only reach up to escorting friendlies; the other game mechanisms are not taught here. The campaign does have fourth-wall breaking messages and info-drops which provide instructions on how to utilize these other game mechanisms, but these do not reach the level of clarity in the tutorial.

(Considering that the tutorial itself already has issues with poor translation and imprecise instructions, the ones in the campaign are even more difficult to comprehend.)

The limited tutorial means that the player will need to do his/her own research into how the game works by surfing forums and wikis. This is easier to do now in 2016, but it would have been difficult back in 2010 when this game came out.

SOMETIMES POOR LOCALIZATION:

Firstly, it has to be said that Star Wolves 3’s English translation is much better than the first Star Wolves’, and certainly better than the second. Unfortunately, it is still not very good.

This can be seen as early as the tutorial. In one of the lessons, the player is instructed to make use of a vessel’s consumable item to repair itself. However, the tutorial specifically refers to this consumable item as an ability, and calls it “self-repair” instead of the name of the item (which is the “Troll” emergency self-repair one-time-use device).

In addition, there are a lot of grammatical hiccups in the writing of the game. For example, grammatical articles like “the” and “a” are missing, which just gives the impression that the writers are Russians with stereotypically poor grasp of English.

Unfortunately, these are merely some examples of the many, many translation hiccups in the game.

MOVEMENT OF VESSELS IN SPACE:

Too many other titles which are purportedly set in space simplify space as a giant petri dish on which every vessel has only two-dimensional movement, much like germs in said petri dish.

The Star Wolves series does not partake in this cheap simplification. It has movement in all three dimensions of space. Space vessels can perform movement in all six-axes of directions (translation in three mutually orthogonal directions, and rotations about the axes of these linear directions). The third game continues this tradition.

When moving towards something, either to approach it or shoot at it, vessels will move in a straight line across 3D space towards the latter. Nimbler craft will also jink and turn in space, thus giving a believable impression of 3D movement.

There is still a system which establishes points of reference in space. Chief of these is the 2D plane which represents the map. Vessels will always attempt to reorient themselves according to this 2D plane. Consequently, their movement is closer to those in Homeworld (which is of course a good thing), but not like those in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident (which would have been even better).

However, in practice, the ability to move in three-dimensions will not matter much in the gameplay, mainly due to how the developers designed the maps in the game. This will be elaborated later.

SLOW PAINFUL START:

The game is surprisingly unforgiving to a new player. It will emphasize the setting of its story by forcing the player into tense situations within the first map alone: the player’s first ship is defenseless, and other characters know that. If the player picks dialogue options which do not have the protagonist dance to the tune of these other people, or dilly-dally and not follow objectives which have been given, the protagonist’s ship is simply shot to bits.

It would be a rough start to players who had been informed of promises about freedom of gameplay in the marketing blurbs of the game. Indeed, this promise will not be delivered until more than an hour into a playthrough. The player is shunted on one quest after another before the gameplay mechanisms which allow freer gameplay are finally made available to the player.

MOTHERSHIP:

Like the previous Star Wolves titles, the player has a Mothership which acts as the mobile home base of the player’s fleet. However, the player starts with only the Mothership initially, and the first Mothership so happens to be completely defenseless, as mentioned earlier.

Eventually, the player will be able to obtain other types of motherships. These occasions happen to be the main gameplay-affecting consequences of the decisions which the player make as the playthrough progresses. There will be more on decision-making later in another section.

Anyway, any Mothership has a considerable cargo bay. This is, of course, used to store stuff, such as ship parts, spare strike-craft, and missiles (which are consumable ordnance). These stuff will be mostly collected as loot, which the Mothership can retrieve (more on this later).

Obviously, if the Mothership is destroyed, the player suffers a game-over. The Mothership may have more durability than any other vessel in the player’s possession, but it is a large and slow target which cannot survive without the help of escorts.

On the other hand, it is the player’s main source of information of anything around the fleet; it mounts sensor suites which are far more potent than those used by its escort vessels. (There will be more on sensors and fog-of-war later.) It is also the only vessel with the capability to mount super-heavy weapons (more on these later), which the player will need in order to counter other capital ships.

Most importantly, the Mothership is, of course, the Mothership; it has hangars which the escort vessels need in order to be repaired and refitted as necessary.

Some of the milestones which mark the player’s progression in a playthrough are the player’s acquisition of another capital ship, and what has to be done with the previous one (and sometimes this involves fighting the previous one).

Incidentally, the first two Motherships are transport vessels with next-to-worthless value in combat. Eventually, the player gains the Mastiff. This is the first “serious” capital ship because it has hangars for escort vessels, unlike the previous ones, and it has considerable weapon slots.

From here, the player would gain opportunities to gain more durable Motherships, which is certainly needed for the increasingly greater challenges which the player would face. However, these other ships have their own idiosyncrasies. For example, the Astarte has docking bays set in the stern, whereas the Mastiff has a docking bay at the bottom; the placement of the docking bays will determine how prepared escort vessels are when facing enemies who are attacking the Mothership from different directions.

There are more idiosyncrasies, which will be described later after other gameplay designs which are associated with them have been described.

It has to be emphasized here that when the player switches Motherships, the previous one will be lost. This is a permanent choice, but generally, the player will need to switch Motherships as soon as the opportunity arises; the game is not kind to players who are reluctant to do so for whatever reason.

TIME COMPRESSION:

Moving about maps can take a while, mainly due to how slow the player’s Mothership is. Thankfully, there are options to accelerate the progress of in-game time. However, the options are dependent on the player’s computing resources; the higher speeds require more computing power. The time acceleration will automatically downgrade to lower speeds if computing resources become dry for the game.

Conveniently, the game will automatically pause when important events occur, such as the detection of enemies where previously there were none. However, pausing the game for whatever reason will also reset the game speed toggle; the player will need to re-apply the toggle afterwards, which can be tedious.

TRACTOR BEAMING CARGO:

The mothership is capable of taking in cargo which is floating around in space, thanks to a generously long-ranged tractor beam. However, to do so, the Mothership must remain still. (The Mothership can fire its weapons while still tractor-beaming things in though.)

Cargo pods are relatively small items floating in space when compared to any space vessel. However, they still have collision hitboxes and they can be blocked by other obstacles. The player will need to keep this in mind, because the game will not do so for the player.

Anyway, the tractor beam can ‘shine’ through obstacles like asteroids and ship-wrecks, and may cause cargo to collide with them, thus delaying their retrieval. Fortunately, the player can stop this from happening by simply having the Mothership move. Still, this is a work-around for a problem that should have been handled by the developers. As an example of a solution, there could have been indicators that there are obstacles which block the retrieval of cargo.

The Mothership automatically picks things to retrieve. Ostensibly, the player could have the Mothership target individual pieces of cargo. However, this is rendered impractical by how the game implements context-sensitive orders; the player must exactly click on the model of the cargo as seen on screen. If the player is using a zoomed-out view, this is next to impossible. To do so, the player will need to zoom into the screen such that the model of the cargo appears bigger.

SENSORS & FOG-OF-WAR:

All vessels have sensor suites which reveal to them the presence of nearby vessels. Anything beyond their sensor ranges are invisible to the player, including the presence of any allied vessels. There are situations where the player can ‘see’ vessels which are not within the fleet’s sensor ranges, but these are far and few in between.

Interestingly, strike-craft vessels cannot detect anything more than half a screen away on the furthest zoom, if they do not have any additional sensor devices installed. Furthermore, sensor devices take up space that could have been used for other devices.

Besides, the player’s Mothership can mount sensor devices that are capable of seeing further than any strike-craft could. Moreover, it is often important to make sure that the Mothership’s escorts are nearby so that they can support each other in case of ambushes (and there are many ambushes in the game).

This system of sensors and fog-of-war partially apply to vessels under the control of the computer. This is the case for squadrons of strike-craft which are patrolling a map. A hostile squadron will have to detect the player’s fleet within their sensor range before they will take action. Even then, they generally do not alert other squadrons in the map, unless these other squadrons fly close by.

In other cases though, the computer already knows exactly where the player’s fleet is. This happens in the finale of the playthrough and a few other situations, which can be a jarring experience.

It has to be mentioned here that if the player brings up the sector map, the player will only see icons of vessels which the player’s fleet have detected. If they go out of sensor range, their icons will disappear; there will be no indicators that they have been where they were last detected. The only exception is vessels which have been marked as objectives; their icons can be seen moving about in the sector map

ARMOR, SHIELDS & REPAIRS:

“Armor” is the name for the statistic of hit-points for space vessels. If a vessel’s armor is reduced to zero, it is, of course, destroyed. The armor of a vessel is generally fixed according to their model type.

Shields are more configurable, fortunately; people who are familiar with space sci-fi settings would recognize these. Every vessel has a built-in shield generator, but without any additional generators, the shield which it has by default is not strong enough to withstand sustained assaults. Every vessel has at least one system slot which can be used to mount a shield generator, or another device which greatly reduces damage of a certain type. These will be described further later.

A vessel’s shield can recharge over time, but its armor but does not, unless the vessel has a self-repair module mounted. Speaking of which, this is probably a better choice than a shield generator, since every vessel will always have a shield which can recharge by default.

Without a self-repair device, an escort vessel will have to dock with the Mothership. The latter will initiate repairs, and generally restock the former’s payload of consumable ordnance, if there is any mounted on it and if the latter vessel has stocks of the relevant ordnance. Docking is a very slow process, however.

There are other ways with their own advantages and disadvantages. They will be described later where relevant.

As for the Mothership, there are even fewer means of getting repaired. The player can visit maintenance stations for repairs, but the stations will charge fees and there are not many of such stations around. The more reliable means of repairing the Mothership is to mount a self-repair device on it. However, this also means that the Mothership must not get into battles of attrition, and unfortunately, there are a few such battles in the game.

(Incidentally, the previous games were far more forgiving about repairs for the Mothership.)

It is worth noting here that if a vessel’s shield does not have enough strength left to absorb a hit, the remainder of the damage from the hit is inflicted on the vessel’s armor. In other words, this game’s shielding system works more like the one seen in Starcraft than the one in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.

COLLISIONS:

Things which move or just drift around in space do happen to have collision hitboxes. If one thing collides with another, both will be damaged.

However, there may be an issue of believability with the factors which determine how much damage is inflicted. It would appear that the relative difference in the masses of the colliding objects is the most significant factor, and perhaps the only one.

For example, this reviewer has seen two fighters colliding with each other at high speeds. They did not inflict severe damage on each other, and that is despite having weakened shields.

Yet, as another example, if a fighter so much as scrapes against an asteroid for more than two seconds without bouncing off, it is destroyed. (The bouncing-off is essential for its survival.)

Unfortunately, the player will be seeing collisions more than he/she would like, mainly because of problems in the pathfinding scripts for ships.

LOUSY PATHFINDING:

One would think that out in the vast empty, it would be difficult for a space vessel to get caught in obstacles and get left behind by other vessels. Unfortunately, it happens too many times in the game.

Most of the time, the pilots of vessels will actively avoid colliding with obstacles, e.g. other vessels and asteroids. They also appear to calculate their paths ahead of possible collisions.

Unfortunately, they are not always very good at doing so, especially if whatever they risk colliding with also happens to move. Coincidentally, many things in space do actually move.

Chief of these are asteroids. They actually move very slowly; their movement becomes more obvious with the fast-forward function. Incidentally, most vessels are rather poor at avoiding asteroids. Capital-class vessels simply cannot decide what path to take through a dense asteroid field, such that players would eventually learn that it is better to just move around the field than through it.

As for supposedly nimbler vessels, they sometimes collide with the asteroids anyway because their chosen paths have not been updated to include the movement of the asteroids.

The worst cases of bad pathfinding can be seen when a strike-craft collides with another strike-craft, and then have to avoid other strike-craft on the rebound. It rarely happens, but instead of resolving a path to extricate itself, the vessel is caught in a loop of making decisions about the direction which it needs to take. The result is that the strike-craft spins in place, which of course makes it a metaphorical sitting duck. The only way to solve this is to save the game, and then reload the game-save.

(Incidentally, this problem was in Star Wolves 2.)

GAINING EXPERIENCE:

Like the previous Star Wolves games, there are player characters who become the members of the protagonist’s gang (though not necessarily permanently so). There is a progression system which determines their capabilities and how prepared they are (or rather, how prepared the player is) as the playthrough progresses and the challenges (ostensibly) ramps up.

Expectedly, how far a player character has gone through this progression system is determined by the video-game-centric measurement unit that is the time-honored “experience points”.

The in-game documentation and the manual say that gaining experience points is a matter of completing missions. In truth, experience points are only granted at the end of every major stretch of the protagonists’ adventures. For example, a wad of experience points are granted after the protagonists have completed a sojourn into alien-controlled parts of space (which are not even marked on the star-map; more on the star-map later).

There is another way to gain experience, but the game does not appear to mention this in its documentation, whether in-game or in the manual. This other way is simply the destruction of any ship other than the player’s own. Considering that the player’s fleet will be engaging in a lot of fights throughout the game, this is perhaps fitting, though rather exploitable.

Ostensibly, the player can scour a map for hostile contacts after having done missions (or even before doing them), wiping them out if the player has the capability to do so. The player can even attempt to antagonize ships which are ambivalent towards the player’s fleet. (There will be more elaboration on this later, when space stations are described.)

In practice, this eats a lot of time and can be quite boring, even with the time acceleration options (more on this later). Nonetheless, this is one way to gain the money and other assets necessary to be more than prepared for the challenges which occur later in a playthrough.

(Interestingly, static defenses, such as gigantic automated turrets which are floating about in space, do not grant any experience points.)

CHARACTER SPECIALIZATION AND SKILL TREES:

The experience points which a player character has garnered are to be invested into that character’s “skill tree”, the layout of which is dependent on his/her “specialization”. In practice, every named character has/her own unique tree layout, though some of the nodes in their tree may occur in the skill trees of other characters as well.

Upon starting a playthrough, the player has the choice of picking a specialization for the player character, like the first Star Wolves. There are four specializations, all of which have skill nodes which determine how the player character will perform in battle. There are no specializations which will render the player character weak and worthless in battle, fortunately, but this is also a hint that the game will be oriented around a lot of combat; this caveat will be elaborated later along with quest/mission designs.

Anyway, the player will spend the experience points of every player character on ‘unlocking’ (for lack of a better word) the skill nodes in their specialization trees. Nodes which are lower in the trees take more experience points to be unlocked, but they are of course commensurately more powerful.

Every skill node comes with a flavor description and the description about their gameplay benefits, so the player can plan the advancement of every character. Also, it is interesting that the flavor descriptions also attempt to explain away the gameplay balance designs of some of the skills, such as the ones with limited uses.

MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE NODES:

In the specialization trees of some characters, there are skill nodes which appear on the same branch. They offer variants of the same type of bonuses. One example of such bonuses are weapon proficiencies, which increase the accuracy of weapons which belong to the category which is mentioned in their descriptions. Most characters have only one weapon proficiency skill, but there are characters with more than one.

For example, there is Nataly. She is a player character which can only be obtained late into a playthrough and only by making a certain decision instead of another (which will retain the service of another player character, who will otherwise be replaced by Nataly). She has two options for weapon proficiency: cannons or lasers. She is one of few characters in the game to have more than one weapon proficiency option.

Presumably, the player could purchase both; there is no in-game description that mentions that the player cannot do this. However, in truth, the player can only pick one of the two. After the player has done so, the player will not seem to be able to purchase the other, even if the player character has the points for that.

This is actually an intended gameplay balance design, as mentioned in one unillustrated paragraph with no sub-header in the manual, page 22. Of course, there is the argument that the player should have read the manual first.

(By the way, laser proficiencies cover not just the use of lasers, but also particle projectors as well. This is mentioned in the manual but not the in-game description.)

STRIKE-CRAFT TIERING:

Perhaps in an attempt to introduce a pacing of sorts into the player’s advancement through the progress system, there is a branch of “skills” in every skill tree which determines the types of strike-craft ships which a player character can fly. This in turn is associated with the tiering of strike-craft vessels. (These tiers are called “generations” in-game, according to the narrative about the backstory of the development of strike-craft vessels in the Star Wolves universe.)

Without the necessary skill to pilot a certain tier of strike-craft, a player character cannot be assigned into any vessel of that tier. There is no other benefit to having the skill, which often takes a lot of experience points which could have gone elsewhere. On the other hand, being able to field the higher-tier ships is a necessity if the player’s fleet is to remain competitive.

SHIP DEVICE SLOTS & STATISTICS:

In the case of non-capital-class vessels, the practical differences between ship models are their mix of device slots and statistics; these are shown in their descriptions.

The gameplay significance of the statistics would be quite apparent to any veteran of Space Rangers and similar games. They determine the combat performance of a ship, its survivability in particular.

As for the slots, there are three types: weapons, systems and missiles. Generally, strike-craft vessels have a minimum total of four slots, but the later-generation (i.e. higher tier) ones have more, typically in a mix of these three types.

There are in turn two sub-types of weapon slots: ‘light’ and ‘heavy’. Light weapon slots are usually found in nimbler but more fragile strike-craft models, whereas the heavy ones are found in models which are intended to take hits. However, there are a few ship models which have a mixture of light and heavy weapon slots.

Despite being primarily used by nimbler fighters, the guns which go into light weapon slots are not push-overs; they often have incredible rates of fire to compensate for their low damage-per-hit and short range. Incidentally, Berserk and Alien guns go into these slots too, and these are some of the most accurate weapons in the game. Still, if the player wants an expectedly short engagement to end in just the first volley, heavy weapons have the power to do that.

Missile slots are, as their name suggests, meant for missiles. Some strike-craft vessels are designed to be missile carriers, and as such have many missile slots. However, not a lot of missiles can go into any slot; some missiles can only be packed in ones or twos in each.

This means that the player must be careful in their use. This is just as well, because well-placed missiles can turn the tide of battle. Moreover, missiles cannot be easily restocked during battle, because this involves the tedious process of having to dock with the Mothership.

System slots are slots which system devices go into; some system devices have been described earlier. Additional shield generators are further examples of these, in case the player wants some additional general-purpose defensive assets for his/her vessels. There are also always-functioning self-repair devices, which practically grant vessels the ability to “regenerate” lost hit-points. There are also more specialized devices, but these will be described later along with the gameplay of combat.

It must be mentioned here that the Mothership and its escort vessels cannot change the devices in their slots on the fly. In the case of strike-craft, they have to dock with the Mothership, after which the player can alter their load-outs. Of course, as has been mentioned earlier, docking is a slow procedure and quite risky to perform during fights.

CANNOT SAVE LOAD-OUTS:

Unfortunately, the player cannot save load-out configurations for the sake of quick changes. Considering that close contemporaries, such as Space Pirates and Zombies, have implemented features of convenience to do exactly this, the lack of this feature in Star Wolves 3 can seem unacceptable.

More importantly, a load-out saving feature would have been invaluable in strategies which involve using disposable ships, if the player has so much money that such strategies are viable.

UNCLEAR STACKING OF BENEFITS FROM SYSTEM DEVICES:

Every vessel has at least one slot for a system device. In the case of vessels with multiple slots, they can obviously mount a greater number of devices. However, it is not always clear what would happen if two of the same devices are mounted on the same vessel.

In the case of sensor devices, mounting more than one sensor does not cause their benefits to stack; it appears that the sensor with the greater range will take effect, but not the lesser one(s). Of course, one can argue in the favour of the game that this encourages the player to swap out older models for newer ones.

In the case of shields, mounting more than one shield generator appears to stack their benefits together. This appears to extend to self-repair devices too. This means that the player can stack them together for increased shielding or repair rates, but the player will have to consider the opportunity cost of mounting these instead of other devices.

Then, there are devices with unclear results when stacked together. These are the damage-mitigation devices, such as the anti-laser and anti-missile devices. Early observations would suggest that their effects do not stack, but without extensive measurements and statistical calculations, it would be hard to come to anything more than educated guesswork.

CONSUMABLE ITEMS:

Strike-craft vessels can mount consumable items (called ‘emergency-use devices’ in-game), which take up the same slots as system devices; the player will be able to obtain these halfway into a playthrough. Consumable items do not provide persistent benefits, but they do give an edge for one-off encounters, which compensate for the opportunity cost of mounting an actual system device.

Unfortunately, consumable items are not in great enough supply to make their use viable in long-term strategies. The player can attempt to re-dock with space stations to have them appear for sale (more on this later), but this is very tedious. Furthermore, even if consumable items are up for sale, they appear in small quantities.

There is perhaps a missed opportunity here to create an additional slot type, specifically for the use of consumable items. Such an addition would have allowed the feature of consumable items to be better implemented.

MOTHERSHIP COMBAT CAPABILITY – OVERVIEW:

As stated earlier, the Mothership is the player’s greatest source of firepower. This was so in the first game and remains so in the third. There are some differences though.

Some of the changes are welcome, for they introduce new ways for the Mothership to blow things up. Unfortunately, notable absences in the designs of the Mothership in the previous game have remained in the third, disappointingly. These will be described in the following sections.

MOTHERSHIP WEAPON LAYOUT/PLACEMENTS:

In the previous games, the Motherships are pretty much ugly tubular things; the second game’s Mothership, in particular, is hideously so. Nevertheless, this meant that they have the structural design which is necessary to mount turrets such that they can attack anything around them (even though they could not bring all of their firepower to bear on a single target).

In the third game, there are more than just one model of Mothership. The different Motherships have different statistics as well as different shapes, which affect their hitboxes. Most importantly, the different Motherships have different layouts for their turrets.

For example, some of the Motherships, such as the Mastiff and the Manticore (which is a very late-game acquisition) have most of their turrets unable to shoot at anything that is directly behind them due to the shape of their hull. (These Motherships usually compensate by being considerably faster than the other Motherships, such that turning around to face enemies which were behind them is not a problem.)

As contrasting examples, Motherships such as the Astarte and the Lion Mk 2 (which is also another late-game acquisition) have prong-like shapes, which affords wider arcs of fire for their turrets. (On the other hand, these Motherships are among the slowest at turning.)

“MAJOR-CALIBER” GUNS:

In the previous games, capital ships such as the Motherships can have turrets mounted on them, but there are no weapons which particularly utilize their stocky builds. In Civil War, the Mothership has weapons which befit its status as a bearer of asteroid-shattering heavy weapons. (Only the Mastiff and bigger Motherships can mount these, however.)

These weapons, called ‘major-caliber guns’, are typically mounted on the front of the Mothership. They can only ever fire forward, meaning that the Mothership rarely hits anything smaller or faster than another capital ship.

On the other hand, other capital ships are the intended targets for major-caliber guns. In fact, after the player has obtained some of the most powerful major-caliber guns in the game, most opposing capital ships would fall with just a few shots.

However, major-caliber guns are some of the most expensive ship parts in the game; the late-game ones can reach up to half a million credits in cost. Nevertheless, the player would be wise to get them, because the Mothership has slots for these and its slots should always be filled out so as to maximize its firepower potential.

If there is anything disappointing about these guns, it is that they are practically forward-facing howitzers and little more, despite the seeming variety among them. There is a missed opportunity for more interesting weaponry, much like there is a missed opportunity to inject more diversity in the turrets of the Mothership.

STILL NO MISSILES FOR THE MOTHERSHIP:

The Mothership still lacks any slots for missiles. This has always been the case since the first game, so it might be disappointing that the missed opportunity of having the Mothership act like a portable missile silo has remained.

Considering that the game’s developer has managed to implement code for the Mothership to have really big guns, the fact that they could not or would not for missiles is rather perplexing.

MOTHERSHIP OPERATOR & FIRMWARE:

In the first game, the Mothership has its own auto-pilot. In the second, the Mothership has two operators, both with their own skill trees.

In the third game, there is sort of a compromise between these two different designs. A player character can be assigned to pilot the Mothership; this is something that the player would learn if he/she read the manual thoroughly (and thus noticed the statement about this at page 30). There is nothing to indicate this feature in-game.

With a player character as an operator, the Mothership will benefit from some, but not all of the player character’s skills. For example, if the player character has any skill which improves his/her accuracy at using weapons, this bonus will be passed onto the Mothership.

Unfortunately, assigning a character to a Mothership prevents the player from using that character’s special abilities. Perhaps there is a limitation in the user interface which prevents this (special ability buttons only appear above the icons for escort vessels), but this is still an unfortunate omission.

This means that the player is probably better off putting a character in an escort vessel than on Mothership-operating duty, if only so that the character can be fully utilized. This leaves the player with the auto-pilot function for the Mothership, which by default, is not particularly competent. (Despite the term “auto-pilot”, the Mothership is still well within the player’s control.)

Fortunately, the player can choose to upgrade the Mothership’s auto-pilot firmware; this can be done at “maintenance stations”, which, in the narrative of the game, are automated space stations which are designed to service capital ships. Firmware upgrades do not make the Mothership any smarter (e.g. its pathfinding is still terrible), but they do grant bonuses which are similar to those which can be provided by pilots.

On the other hand, there can only be one firmware suite which is installed on the Mothership at any one time. If the player wants to switch to another, the player will need to buy another firmware suite to replace the existing one; the player does not get any trade-in deal for the current one.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY – NO DELIBERATE RAMMING FEATURE:

The gameplay element of collisions has been mentioned earlier. Although it may be difficult to countenance the thought of escort vessels ramming into things, it would have been easy to imagine that capital ships like the Mothership can do just that. Indeed, this can be seen if smaller vessels fly into the Mothership’s path, and the Mothership cannot dodge them in time.

Unfortunately, there is no feature to deliberately force the Mothership to collide with another thing. It is also difficult to set up a situation such that small enemies fly into the Mothership, because the Mothership will always attempt to avoid collisions.

Having such a feature – and equipment which is geared towards ramming – would have added an aspect to space battles beyond just shooting and evading attacks.

SPACE STATIONS:

Space stations are places where the player can sell surplus equipment and buy new ones to up-gun his/her fleet, as well as obtain bits on the backstory and its development as the game progresses.

In the previous game, space stations were also where the player obtains repeatable missions. This is absent in Civil War, and perhaps for the better, because it was not exactly a well-received feature. (One of its main criticisms is that repeatable missions were used to pad the game’s length with.)

Space stations are the only places where the load-out of the Mothership can be changed. This is understandable to some degree, because the Mothership is after all a massive ship with massive hardware which cannot be easily changed in space. However, it has to be said here that only the main station of a planetary system allows this, and sometimes it can be difficult to know which station is this one if there are multiple space stations in the map. Moreover, maintenance stations do not allow a load-out change, despite being supposedly designed to service capital ships.

There are some other designs about space stations, which will be described shortly.

WARP-IN RESPONSE FLEETS:

Space stations can indeed be attacked deliberately – though this draws a rather nasty response by its affiliated faction. A hostile fleet of considerable size will warp in out of seemingly nowhere, and more often than not, this fleet is considerably well-armed.

Amusingly, not every squadron in the response fleet will hunt down the player’s fleet; only those which have detected the Mothership would. The others would actually fly off and assume patrol patterns. This means that the player may be able to exploit this by making use of stealth system devices (which are mostly useless throughout the game, mainly because in scripted scenarios, enemies know exactly where the Mothership is).

An observant player might notice that there is a disparity between the strengths of the response fleets of different factions. For example, the response fleets of pirate-affiliated space stations are rather weak. The unscrupulous player can exploit this, especially if the player’s fleet already has an advantage in firepower over the response fleet that would appear.

Deliberate attacks on space stations are not the only occasions in which response fleets would appear. There are at least a couple of instances in the game where poking the wrong thing can result in endless waves of hostile vessels warping in to punish the player.

DOCKING IN SPACE STATIONS REQUIRED FOR SPENDING EXPERIENCE POINTS:

Perhaps the least welcome design about space stations is the need to dock with them in order to spend the experience points which the player characters have accrued.

There can be the argument that these space stations are somehow the places where the characters consolidate their experiences and learn new skills, but it can also be argued that they had been thinking of new maneuvers and ideas while in their vessel cockpits as well. Besides, there is no narrative justification for this requirement.

This requirement was not in the previous games, by the way, so this is also an unwelcome change. The progression systems for the characters would have been a lot more enjoyable without this restriction.

SPACE STATION GOODS & FTU WAREHOUSE:

When the player docks with a space station, the variety and quantity of goods in its stores will be generated from a database which is unique to that space station. If the player has a team member who has a skill which grants good standing with the Free Trade Union (FTU), the FTU-exclusive store (which have much better – and more expensive – stuff to offer) will also be available and will have its goods generated in the same way.

Incidentally, the selection of goods will always be refreshed every time that the Mothership docks with it. Consequently, a clever player may attempt to re-dock with a space station repeatedly in order to have a certain item made available for purchase again.

The only major problem with this exploit is that the player will have to put up with the scripts to have the Mothership dock with space stations. If the player wants to have the Mothership re-dock with the space station, the Mothership will have to move away and then approach the docking platform again.

This issue was in the previous game, and it appears to have been retained. On the other hand, it can be argued that the pathfinding for the Mothership is better handled in this game; in the previous one, it might bump repeatedly against the space station before it manages to correct its path.

ESCAPE PODS & BOUNTIES:

In Star Wolves 2, human-operated ships may release escape pods upon being destroyed. In the case of escape pods which contain player characters, this is the way to rescue them and return them to the service of the player’s fleet. In the case of quest-specific NPCs, having their escape pods is usually a prerequisite to the completion of their associated quests.

If the escape pods belong to generic NPCs, the player can bring them over to the nearest “patrol station” (and these specifically have to have the word “patrol” in their names). This will trigger a conversation in which the station receives the escape pods. In return for escape pods from imperial militaries, patrols or corporations, the player receives experience points. As for escape pods which contain pirates, the player claims bounties instead.

This gameplay element is mainly there for flavor and backstory-highlighting; the reward of money and experience points is not substantial enough to make retrieving escape pods a competitive alternative to looting parts from destroyed ships or collecting fees from completing missions.

MAP DESIGNS:

In the previous games, most maps are designed with just about all stellar bodies, be they asteroids, space stations or other massive things, being set on the same horizontal plane. This was a missed opportunity to make better use of the fully three-dimensional game engine.

Civil War does slightly better at distributing objects in maps, e.g. objects are often located at different levels of elevation. For example, different asteroid fields are rarely located on the same plane of elevation. Some other objects are located on the same plane, however, but this is usually for believable reasons. For example, space stations are located on the same plane, which can perhaps be explained away as an attempt at standardizing the positioning of man-made stellar objects.

This goes a long way to make space feel a lot less empty and more believable than it was in the previous games.

MAP DISPLAY:

Like in the previous games, the player can bring up a map which shows the current system and its contents as icons.

With the tap of another button, the player can also activate the display of the sensor ranges of vessels; they appear as wave-like pings. Any other vessel, including even allied vessels, can only be detected if they enter the sensor ranges of the vessels in the player’s fleet.

Interestingly, if the sensor ranges of opposing vessels overlap with those of the player’s, they also appear as well. This helps the player determine whether an enemy squadron has detected the player’s fleet.

However, these designs for sensor ranges are not explained in-game. They are mentioned in the manual in page 12, but in a paragraph which is in turn in an unmarked section.

Portals, space stations and points of interests are always marked on the sector maps, so the player should not have a hard time looking for these.

If the player is on a quest, there are cyan lines which show the direction that the Mothership should go to in order to pursue it. Sometimes, there are no lines at all. In these cases, the player will need to look through the quest log and mailbox in order to know where to go to next.

There is a limitation with the system map; the player cannot freely rotate it. Although the player can toggle height indicators for objects, these indicators appear as vertical lines, which can only be seen well if the player can rotate the system map display in the first place.

PORTALS:

Like in the previous games, there are hyperspace portals which connect one planetary system to another in the narrative of Civil War. From the perspective of gameplay, starting from the second game, these portals are used to facilitate an almost free-form exploration of known space. Civil War continues this gameplay feature.

Of course, such designs are nothing new in games with space sci-fi settings; it has been done before in earlier games, such as Independence War 2.

There may be a problem with the backstory of the portals and how it does not always match actual gameplay. A certain character by the name of “Ternie” mentions that only heavy and large ships can survive transitions through the portals; smaller ships will be torn apart by the rigours of FTL travel. However, the player will often see escort vessels arriving together with trader ships, thus contradicting this sci-fi claim.

Of course, this could be due to a problem in the localization; Ternie could have meant that smaller craft requires the presence and proximity of larger craft in order to pass through portals. However, if this is the case, this is yet another example of the poor localization damaging the experience of the game.

It is worth noting here that transportation through any portal in a system will generally be disabled if the player has been assigned a quest to perform in the system itself.

STAR MAP:

With a tap of a button, the player can bring up the star map, which charts the regions of space which is known to humanity. There are icons which indicate the presence and locations of planetary systems. Each of these has been given flavor text. This text may also be reflected in the gameplay; for example, systems which are described to have brisk trade will often have quite a lot of trade convoys going back and forth between the portals and space stations.

(It is worth noting here that this was not the case in the second game, which was quite lackadaisical at portraying systems as they are written to be.)

The main value of the star map is its use in keeping track of quests. Systems which the player will have to move through in order to complete the current main quest will have their outlines coloured yellow. As the player moves from one of these systems to the next, the previous system will have its outline removed.

However, as convenient as this sounds, this is actually hard-coded; the sequence of systems which are outlined yellow is based on where the player triggers the next quest and where the player needs to go to. If the player deviates from the sequence, the path will not be updated to reflect the player’s current location.

VOYAGE-SKIPPING PROMPTS:

When the player has started a quest which requires the player’s fleet to get to a system which is far away, the player will be given a choice to skip the voyage outright. This is usually a good choice, because the voyage tends to be uneventful and thus quite dull.

It is also worth noting here that a similar yet unwelcome feature was implemented in the original Star Wolves 2. At certain points in the story of that game, the player was unexpectedly shunted over to another planetary system after a story-based milestone had been reached. This can be unpleasant, especially if the player did not expect this.

ENEMIES:

There are many factions which the player can anger to the point of hostility, but all of the enemies which the player would fight in the game can be generally lumped into a few categories, in descending order of frequency: strike-craft vessels, capital ships, static defenses and corvettes.

Enemy capital ships are equipped in ways similar to those of the player’s Mothership, e.g. they have major-caliber guns and turrets. However, they are rarely, if not never, seen launching fighters and other escort vessels, much less receive any vessels which would dock with them. This would have been quite a sight, especially to players who have played the Homeworld games, and it is a missed opportunity.

If the player always keeps an eye out for the next big gun to fit on the player’s Mothership, it will eventually be more than a match for any single capital ship. Hence, the game will resort to throwing more than one at the player, and will certainly resort to this convenient kind of challenge in the run-up to the finale(s).

Anyway, the bulk of the enemies which the player would face are strike-craft. They always come in packs. If the player is not careful about drawing the attention of more squadrons of them, they can quickly become unmanageable. Furthermore, if the player gets the attention of throngs of strike-craft with missiles, he/she can expect a distressing avalanche of these.

Static defenses only appear in a few places in any playthrough, often guarding portals or space stations. They are very well-armed and are quite tough; furthermore, they are often clustered in such a manner that turrets which are effective against strike-craft will be close enough to give anti-fighter cover to turrets which are effective against capital ships. Patience is a virtue against such enemies, e.g. the player might want to consider using long-ranged weapons to knock them out.

Corvettes are almost as rare as static defenses. These are ships with a weight class that is between strike-craft and capital ships; they often carry turrets in addition to forward-facing weaponry. Incidentally, only the Butcher model is retained from Star Wolves 2, which can be disappointing to players who had been hoping for more variety from this type of ship.

ENEMIES HAVE BAD PATHFINDING:

Ultimately, an observant player will notice that the best strategy against any enemies in the game is to exploit their bad pathfinding scripts while managing the bad pathfinding of the player’s own ships.

For example, the massive Berserk fleet which will hound the player’s fleet in one of the finales can be defeated by simply having the Mothership run away from them and then swerve around them in a deep curvature while having its escorts docked.

Ostensibly, any of the ships in the Berserk fleet should be able to catch up to the player’s Mothership, but because they get into each other’s way a lot, their pathfinding becomes a confused mess. After repeating this for a few times, the Berserk fleet will be so scrambled and strung out that they can be defeated piecemeal.

SCANNING SHIPS:

The player can ‘scan’ a ship which is not owned by him/her. This brings up a display window which is not unlike the one which the player gets when checking the load-out of a ship. This feature is only told to the player via the game’s manual, and even then only in an unmarked paragraph in page 24.

Anyway, this is how the player will be able to determine the tactics and load-outs which are useful at countering the capabilities of said ship. If the ship belongs to a squadron, the player may want to check the load-outs of the other ships too; this may reveal the role of each member of the squadron.

Incidentally, most of the factions in the game have a preference for specific load-outs, making their armed forces a lot easier to counter. Even the Berserks, which are ships that belong to a sentient AI, and the Aliens, which are supposed to have technological superiority over humans, have predilections towards specific weaponry (namely their own).

However, pirates, mercenaries and system patrols have less predictable load-outs, as befitting their hodge-podge affiliations.

COMBAT – OVERVIEW:

Part and parcel of the tactical decisions which the player would make during combat involves the utilization of several gameplay elements, most of which have been retained from earlier titles. They will be described further in the following sections.

ACTIVATED ABILITIES:

Like the pilots in the previous games, the player’s pilots have skills which grant them abilities which in turn can be used during battle.

Most of the special abilities have been retained from the previous games. For example, there are the abilities which temporarily increase the damage output and fire rates of the pilots, and the always-handy ability to completely restore the shields of a ship.

Some abilities are revamped versions of abilities in the previous games. For example, there is Sixth Sense, a revision of an ability which reduced incoming damage in the previous game. Hacking abilities also return, and there are now more than one permutation of these (though two variants are unique to only a certain player character).

Fortunately, the descriptions of these abilities do not suffer from poor localization. Their gameplay effects are well-described, though the descriptions are nestled among flavor text which tries to explain their limitations in ways that are not always convincing.

ANTI-LASER RESISTANCES:

Sometimes, simply dodging shots is not good enough, especially considering that the generally lousy pathfinding scripts for any ship can cause it to fly into the line of fire of opposing ships. Therefore, there have to be – and there are – means of mitigating the damage that would be inflicted by shots which cannot be evaded in time.

Some of these means diminish the damage that could have been inflicted. Chief examples of these are “anti-laser” devices, which are specifically designed to counter laser and particle beam weaponry. These weapons are the most accurate in the game, and tend to have incredibly high damage-per-hit ratings.

However, there does not appear to be any special counters for ballistic weaponry, namely rapid-fire guns and kinetic cannons. On the other hand, these weapons do not happen to immediately hit their targets like lasers do, so anti-laser devices probably have been introduced (in Star Wolves 2, no less) for the purpose of gameplay balance.

MISSILE USE & PROTECTION FROM MISSILES:

Missiles have always been ordnance with a high damage-per-hit rating and significant area of effect in the Star Wolves series, so it is understandable that they operate on rules which are different from those for other munitions.

Missiles are the slowest munition type, but they are still faster than even the fastest light fighter. Therefore, the player can see them coming, but unless they are dumb-fire missiles (i.e. missiles without guidance systems), they cannot be dodged without resorting to hard counter-measures.

Speaking of which, there are a few types of anti-missile measures, each of which had been introduced in the first game and is wisely retained in the third. All of them may work against missiles, but they have secondary effects which are worth noting.

Firstly, there is the counter-measure that simply shoots down missiles. All active anti-missile systems do exactly this. Missiles which are shot explode prematurely, meaning that if they are shot before they can move further away from their parent ship, the latter is damaged by the explosions. Active anti-missile systems on escort vessels require the full attention of their pilots, but the ones which are mounted on the Mothership work automatically, albeit with typically less efficiency.

Secondly, there are flares. These attempt to redirect missiles by tricking them into hitting them. Missiles can indeed hit the flares and explode, so the ship which released them will have to move away or be caught in the area of effect. Furthermore, even though a missile can be tricked into swerving of course, it can still hit something anyway if it has yet to fizzle out.

Finally, there is the counter-measure that simply diverts missiles away. The Mothership can mount such a system; an incoming wave of missiles being diverted away from it can be an impressive sight.

Considering the significant number of anti-missile measures, the player may want to consider targeting enemy ships which happen to have such counter-measures before the others, if the player is fond of missile-based offensive tactics. Of course, this means that the player will have to deal with the opportunity cost of not focusing on other sorts of enemies first.

It is worth noting here that anti-missile measures are completely useless against dumb-fire missiles, which so happen to be a lot faster than guided ones. Incidentally, missile-gunner characters have skills which greatly increase the speed of dumb-fire missiles, making them significantly more reliable at hitting strike-craft.

ACTIVE REPAIR:

In addition to active anti-missile duties, a member of a strike-craft squadron can be set to an active repair role, if it is equipped with an active repair system. This can be seen when fighting USS and Ino-Co squadrons, which tend to have vessels with these systems.

Active repair systems, as their name suggests, are used to repair other vessels while they are not docked with any capital ship. Repairs which are done in this manner happen to be quicker than any repairs which are applied by self-repair systems. Furthermore, if the operator is skilled enough, active repairs can be faster than even the repairs which are done when a vessel is docked within the Mothership. Therefore, it might be worthwhile to have a specialist character forgo combat for a while to repair the ship of another character.

Unfortunately, active repair systems which are mounted on escort vessels may not be used to repair the Mothership. This is because the Mothership cannot be included in teams.

REPLACING SHIPS & RESCUING TEAM MEMBERS:

A player who puts in time to accrue a lot of money by any means may find that eventually, he/she would have already tricked out his/her fleet until it cannot be tricked out further. This occurs after the player has been become able to comfortably afford items with price tags of around half a million credits.

After this, the player can just spend any surplus money on replacement ships and parts, which would be convenient if the player does not like reloading game-saves because an escort vessel is blown up during battle.

DOCKING WITH THE MOTHERSHIP:

Escort vessels have to be docked within the Mothership in order to replenish their missile reserves. As long as the Mothership still have spare missiles, their slots will be restored. If there is a lack of missiles, the portraits of the characters who are piloting them will have icons which indicate this. Docking with the Mothership also allows vessels to be repaired in relative safety.

In Star Wolves 2, having the Mothership’s escort vessels dock with it is a tedious and arduous affair, mainly due to the lousy pathfinding scripts. In Star Wolves 3, the game’s developers try to solve this problem by forcing strictly-coded pathfinding routes on the escort vessels.

Unfortunately, the orderly pathfinding scripts also happen to be rather slow to take effect. It can be frustrating to watch the escort vessels line themselves up slowly, entering the Mothership one by one, even with time compression. This also makes docking with the Mothership during combat an almost-impractical matter, which also means that replenishing missiles during combat is not feasible.

This becomes even more difficult if enemies are swarming about the Mothership; if just one enemy crosses the docking path of any of the vessels which are trying to dock, docking will be delayed.

The game designers could have implemented a riskier but faster form of docking, which would have added sophistication to the game, while also providing a solution to this problem.

STEALTH:

For what it’s worth, there is an attempt at implementing “stealth”-oriented gameplay in Star Wolves 3. Specifically, there are system devices which effectively reduce the sensor range of enemy ships. Practically speaking, the player’s ships will have to be a lot closer to enemy ships before the latter detects them. This would be helpful if the player wishes to avoid the local system’s patrols.

Unfortunately, this gameplay element does not work in story-based missions. More often than not, enemies in these missions already know where the player’s ships are, or they just appear very close to the player’s fleet, sometimes from out of nowhere. At its best, this gameplay element is little more than a token effort on the game designers’ part.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS:

When the player travels across a system which is described as having some level of human activity, he/she may be approached by NPC-controlled ships.

The most common of these occurrences are pirate squadrons appearing on the edges of the sensor ranges of the player’s fleet. They will attempt to extort payment from the player, though at later stages of the playthrough, they will amount to little more than brief annoyances.

The local patrol squadrons, if they are not hostile, may have an offer of a job for the player if his/her ships come into close proximity with them. Usually, they will offer a higher than usual bounty for the extermination of certain local pirates, if there are any.

Finally, there are traders. If the player comes close enough to their transport ship, they may make remarks about the other factions, or more importantly, hail the player for a conversation or trade offer.

In the case of trade offers, the player is brought to a screen not unlike the store screen for space stations if he/she agrees to the offers. The selection of items is greatly randomized, but there might just be something which the player wants.

(It is also worth noting here that if the player docks with pirate- or smuggler-controlled stations, the latter are considered as traders, and not actual space stations. Therefore, the facility to swap the Mothership’s parts is not available at their stations.)

In the case of conversations, traders might offer information for sale. Generally, this information points to the presence of hidden caches of hardware in the space of certain planetary systems. There will be more elaboration on this in the following section.

These encounters with the local inhabitants of a system and ships which are passing through it are mainly in the game for the purpose of flavor. More importantly, it addresses a major complaint in the second game, which was that planetary systems felt empty.

HIDDEN CACHES:

As mentioned earlier, traders will inform the player that there are hidden caches in certain systems. They are certainly not easy to find, even if the player knows that they are there.

This is so because the caches are often secreted away within wrecks and – somehow – asteroids. There are visual signs which give them away, such as blinking red lights which have been attached onto these objects.

Typically, the only way to get at the caches is to just shoot the suspected wrecks or asteroids. If the player hits the jackpot, loot pops out of them. Otherwise, the player will just have to keep hunting for them; this is not an easy matter, because some of them are so small as to be difficult to spot and target. In fact, without making use of the height indicator display toggle, it would be impossible to know that small asteroids are there because they blend into the background.

PIRACY:

The player might consider attacking traders or massive cargo pods, which are found in some planetary systems. Doing this will invoke a response from the system’s local defenders, and also put the player in poor standing with the faction that owns whatever the player is trying to wreck and loot. The player might even trigger the appearance of a response fleet. Nonetheless, the option to smash-and-grab is there, in case the player has no issues with committing robbery in space.

QUEST CHOICES:

For the prologue section of a playthrough, there is little that the player can do other than to follow the demands of NPCs who will destroy the protagonist’s weak transport vessel if he does not.

After gaining a combat-worthy Mothership, the game will start to pose choices at the player. Some of these do allow the player to return to the other choices which he/she did not pick at a later time, but many of the choices happen to be mutually exclusive options.

From the perspective of gameplay, the main consequences of these choices are the kinds of Motherships which the player would get, and the player characters who would join the player’s team. For example, in this reviewer’s playthrough, the opportunities to gain one of two Motherships were skipped entirely, and one potential team member was not encountered at all.

Such designs suggest considerable replayability, though the actual minute-to-minute gameplay would suggest otherwise.

SEVERAL PERMUTATIONS OF ENDINGS:

Eventually, the player’s choices will determine which ending movie would be shown. There are close to twenty of these, but they have many similarities with each other and the differences tend to be merely circumstantial. Among these endings, there are perhaps only three or four unique endings from a narrative point of view.

Nevertheless, this is a considerable number for a strategy game with space sci-fi settings. Better known titles like Homeworld do not even have multiple alternative endings.

GAMEPLAY DESIGNS OF QUESTS:

Unfortunately, an astute player will also notice that despite the different contexts of the different decisions which he/she would make throughout a playthrough, what he/she has to actually do remains essentially the same from one decision to the next.

To be specific, all the player does in-game can be distilled to the following statements: the player will have to get from point A to point B, while defeating anything along the way (or just running away from them, if this is possible). The player may be able to resolve confrontations peacefully and/or make a detour, but this usually means getting side-tracked to point C before being able to go back on the path to point B again.

After the player gets to point B, he/she is likely to have to fight something again, before being informed that he/she will have to get to point D, and so on. Other than these, the player would be grinding money to purchase the next gear upgrade for his/her fleet.

The simplicity of the gameplay in the pursuit of the quests can make replaying the game quite dreary, despite the different choices and endings which the player might be able to achieve.

Incidentally, this has always been a criticism of the Star Wolves series.

DELAYED UPDATES OF QUEST LISTS AND MAILBOX:

Despite the inclusion of tools such as the ability to look through message logs, a list for quests and a journal and mailbox which the protagonist maintains, the game can give the impression that it is not entirely clear in informing the player about what needs to be done next in order to progress. At worst, it can be obtuse.

The most recurrent examples of this are the delayed updates for the quest listing. The player may have completed some quests, and the quest list usually updates itself to reflect this. However, the player may also receive information about a new quest, such as the protagonist mentioning that he has received a message from a friend to go somewhere, but the list sometimes fails to register this. Furthermore, the protagonist’s journal may not be updated either, and in some cases, the mailbox does not even have the message at all.

When this happens, the player will need to look at the message log (which lists down dialogues as well) to obtain the necessary details.

The abovementioned problem is, of course, still manageable. Besides, once the player moves onto another system, the mailbox and quest list will generally be updated.

What is less manageable is how certain pivotal moments in the game are resolved, or rather, intended to be resolved by the game designers. This will be described shortly.

EXPERIMENTATION IS NOT ALWAYS REWARDED:

Some players might want to experiment with the game’s quest designs in order to see whether there can be any exploits or alternative solutions to problems which may be encountered. There are plenty of the former, but the latter would usually already be spelled out to the player via the remarks of some characters.

For better or worse, there are some quests which will punish the player for not cleaving closely to it. For example, there is a mission in which the player has to escort a convoy which is led by a friend of the protagonist. The player might have the initiative to do forward recon so as to remove any pirates who might threaten the convoy. For the most part, this will work, until the player’s fleet approaches a certain location and triggers the sudden appearance of another fleet.

If the convoy is not close by to verify the role of the player’s fleet, this NPC fleet turns hostile. In other words, the player has been punished for thinking ahead. (In this case, this problem could have been allayed if the player could see the fleet from some distance away, but this is not the case.)

INTRUSIVE CUTSCENES:

In the Star Wolves series, there have been many moments when control is taken away from the player, if only to show him/her some view with a custom-placed camera. This may be an attempt at imitating what Homeworld does with its in-game cutscenes, but the previous Star Wolves titles just could not reproduce the same kind of flair.

Instead, their cutscenes tend to feel juvenile with a lot of unnecessary fighting and a lot of cheesy rock music. Furthermore, the player’s fleet becomes vulnerable to attack during these cutscenes, which make them even less welcome.

Unfortunately, Star Wolves 3 does not do any better.

An example of such a cutscene is an ambush by the Star Wolves universe’s version of rogue robots (called “Berserks” in the English localization of the game, apparently as a tribute to a certain author by the name of Fred Saberhagen); in one certain point in the playthrough, the player will be attacked by a worrisomely numerous Berserk fleet.

A cutscene will play, showing the fleet’s approach and the almost-certain doom that will come with it. The player is supposed to be saved by the intervention of the local patrols, but due to the generally bad pathfinding of vessels which try to maintain formation as a fleet, they are often late at reaching the player’s fleet.

The only way to prevent this cutscene from causing the doom of the player’s fleet is to tap the “ESC” button, effectively ending the in-game cutscene and thus returning control to the player.

NEXT MOTHERSHIP OFTEN HAS POORER EQUIPMENT:

Unfortunately, one of the best things about the game, which is the acquisition of the next Mothership, has its appeal diminished by a setback. This setback is that the next Mothership often comes with its own load-out, which is more than likely to be inferior to the load-out of the player’s previous Mothership.

Of course, as is often the case, all of the previous Mothership’s gear will be transferred over to the next Mothership, but these are stowed away in the latter’s cargo instead of replacing its load-out. The player will have to visit a space station to change the load-out, but a space station is not guaranteed to be nearby when a Mothership transition occurs.

Worse, any strike-craft which are still in the previous Mothership’s hangars will be sent to the cargo bay of the next one, together with their components. This means that the player will need to refit all of them, which is tedious work. The player can of course send them out of the hangars before undergoing the transition, but this could have been unnecessary if there were adequate scripts for transfers.

DIMINISHED CARGO DELIVERY GAMEPLAY & MISSED OPPORTUNITY:

The gameplay element of delivering cargo was introduced in the previous game, and it was much reviled for a good reason: it was emblematic of the boring gameplay of going from point A to point B. More importantly, it was used to pad out the game with by introducing grinding gameplay.

This gameplay element is mostly absent in Civil War. For example, the cargo weight limit mechanism in Star Wolves 2, which was used to limit the number of delivery missions that the player can take on, is not in the third game.

Civil War does have a few missions which are about cargo delivery, but more often than not, the cargo is of a sensitive nature and would get the player in trouble. Still, this is better than the boring tacked-on missions in the previous game.

On the other hand, there can be the impression that there is a missed opportunity to introduce a gameplay feature of trading goods, not unlike what Space Rangers and similar titles have done.

After all, the player character is a member of the Free Trade Union, and his previous career was about trade. In addition to a narrative-based justification, there is the gameplay-related fact that there is a functional network of planetary systems, which is typically the main foundation of goods-trading gameplay in games with space sci-fi settings.

DISPLAY OPTIONS:

The tutorial may be abysmally incomplete, but not all of the developers of the game are as inept as the one who designed the tutorials. The ones who designed the visual display of the game are quite thorough, excepting the rather limited resolution options of course.

Incidentally, some of the possibly irritating display mechanisms for the game are implemented as default display options. For example, the ‘convenience’ of rotating the camera by moving the mouse cursor to the edges of the screen is turned on by default; considering that there are icons such as lists of detected ships and game speed options which are close to the edges of the screen, this is a counter-productive option, which can thankfully be turned off.

LITTLE CHANGE IN UI:

There has been little change in the user interface since the previous games, and its inadequacy is particularly apparent in Civil War. For one, many functions do not have on-screen buttons, such as the display of sensor ranges, which has been described earlier.

VISUAL DESIGNS:

Civil War uses the same game engine as the first game. Its age can be seen in the textures which are used for models. There is also the fact that munitions-fire and muzzle flashes do not always originate from the correct locations, i.e. gun barrels, of a ship.

There is not much animation that the player should expect from a game with a space sci-fi setting in which anything that moves is a space vessel, which certainly does not have a head and limbs.

Explosions have plentiful particle effects, but not enough to obscure the fact that ship models are simply removed and replaced with other models, which are typically mangled and scorched versions of them.

Elite Games Team has tried to update whatever visual designs it can, if only to make them more useful for the purpose of gameplay. For example, ship hulls flash red when self-repair systems are kicking in.

WRITING & LOCALIZATION:

The writing for the first and second official Star Wolves titles is not particularly good; at best, their stories made use of tried-and-true sci-fi tropes, such as ancient aliens and space pirates. Star Wolves

2’s story was particularly notable for being incomplete and poorly edited, e.g. a character which was not recruited would appear later and speak as if she has been in the team all along.

The story in Civil War is much better written, at least when compared to the stories in the previous games. Yet, its localization is spotty here and there, and there are the occasional statements which contradict each other, such as when a character talks about what a clandestine organization has done.

It is worth noting here that Civil War was purportedly developed and written by fans who custom-made a story-based campaign for the first Star Wolves. Civil War also happens to be a sequel to this storyline, though fortunately, it comes with in-game documentation which explains the backstory and summarizes what has happened in the campaign mod for the first game.

(ABSENCE OF) VOICE-ACTING IN LOCALIZED VERSION:

Despite the mention of voice-actors and –actresses in the credits of the game, including in the localized version, there is little to no voice-acting outside of the movie cutscenes (which are packaged in BIK containers, by the way, and can be watched with a suitable video player).

There are signs to suggest that when the English-localized version of the game was made, the Russian voice-overs were simply removed. One of the key signs is that the voice-overs for Kalem, one of the late-game characters to be had, are still in the game and can be heard when the player gives orders to Kalem.

PHOTOSHOPPED CHARACTER PORTRAITS:

According to the manual and in-game credits, most of the character portraits are heavily edited versions of mugshots which the game-makers have obtained from fans of the franchise. The result is that there are a lot of goofy-looking portraits, not unlike the kinds seen in the first Baldur’s Gate. This would not have been an issue, if they did not contrast greatly with reused portraits from the previous game.

MUSIC:

The music in the game is composed of tracks which the player might hear at dance clubs and discos. Other than these, there are electronic tracks with New Age qualities, as well as music from the Russian rock scene.

They would be just palatable to a person who has no particular preference for specific types of music, but for anyone else, they might sound overwrought, especially the tracks which play when the player is not engaged in combat.

SOUND EFFECTS:

Most of the sound effects in Civil War have been recycled from the previous games. There are perhaps new ones, namely for added content like the major-caliber guns.

Ultimately though, the music is actually better at being an aural indicator of what is happening than the sound effects are. This is mainly because the loudness of the music is independent of the zoom of the camera, whereas the sound effects are, and they are almost inaudible at the outmost zoom.

SUMMARY:

Many of Star Wolves 3’s designs, such as the linking of maps into a network and the necessity of interacting with space stations, have already been done in the much-maligned Star Wolves 2. However, unlike the second game, Star Wolves 3 has much better quality in its production and is a lot more feature-complete. In particular, Star Wolves 3’s greatest contribution to the franchise is the expansion of Mothership-related content and the story-based choices which accompany it.

On the other hand, it also removed a lot of the content in Star Wolves 2 without investing effort into reworking it. This led to the diminished presence of corvettes, removal of some late-game fighters and dropping of cargo-delivering gameplay.

Granted, some of this content was of questionable quality when they were included in the previous game. Yet, it would have been better to improve them than to remove them entirely. There are also missed opportunities to have more gameplay features, such as ramming.

Unfortunately, the game inherits some problems from its predecessors. The biggest of these is user-friendliness. Its tutorials are woefully incomplete and the in-game documentation of gameplay mechanisms is composed of little more than brief pop-ups.

Most of the lessons about gameplay will have to be learned by reading the manual. Even then, the manual does not have adequate sub-headers, much less a glossary, to indicate the presence of particularly nuanced gameplay designs.

Although Civil War is much better designed than its predecessors, it is still a gem in the rough. Perhaps the next game could be better, though there has been little news on any sequel or expansion for several years.