New Look at Stars! Supernova

Empire Interactive and developer Mare Crisium recently treated us to a new look at the sequel to Stars!, a space strategy game last updated in 1996. Stars! Supernova brings a significant 32-bit color graphical overhaul and a number of gameplay refinements. While its predecessor had relatively simple graphics, the sequel brings a profusion of detailed art, with 650 ship images, 350 technology graphics, and 48 race portraits. The game's interface windows are also completely resizeable and can even be dragged across multiple monitors.

While the previous game's design primarily rewarded pure economic expansion, Supernova will be open to a broader range of strategies. The espionage model should be more powerful than any other game in the genre, making spies as important for victory as colonies' economies and fleets' military might. The spies all have unique personalities and skills, and their covert actions have a whole range of possible outcomes. An agent sent to destroy an enemy's mass driver facility might only disable it for a short time, or dramatically succeed in destroying the entire colony. And if one of your most experienced spies is discovered, all hope is not lost - an opponent can in fact choose to ransom a captured spy.

The game will fully support both turn-a-day and timed-turn multiplayer modes, and Internet matchmaking will be provided on Empire's dedicated servers. To ensure that the races and strategies of the up to 16 players never resemble each other too closely, much effort has been made to balance the game's highly customizable race builder. When players prefer to customize their races instead of using one of the twelve predefined choices, they are greeted with a multitude of choices, including four basic physiological types, numerous skills, and nearly a dozen social models - each emphasizing a range of behaviors from warmongering to stealth.

Developer Mare Crisium has also added a sophisticated system for automating colony management and tactical combat. The colony-governor AI can be set on a colony basis and will clearly announce its chosen course of action. Build queues also work intelligently enough to allow the slow replenishment of renewable supplies, like mines, on each turn - provided a priority project's long-term schedule leaves extra resources. On the star map, in addition to letting players specify fleet orders on a way-point basis, the AI can accept a longer-term goal and find the most efficient way to accomplish it. Finally, the tactical combat system - which has an auto-resolution feature to free players to concentrate on tactical concerns - allows players to choose each ship class' rules of engagement and features a "what if" battle simulator to test various fleet configurations in virtual battle.

Stars! Supernova is currently being beta-tested and is set for release later this fall.