High level Street Fighter play is often compared to rock-paper-scissors by it's players. So much so, that tournaments will often have mini-tournaments of rock-paper-scissors on the side, the concept is so integral to professional level play. With that in mind, Planetary Annihilation is a billion different rock-paper-scissors matches played simultaneously. In space. With planets. And Death Stars.
Planetary Annihilation is a toy box of weaponry to play with in Solar System Sandpit. It's all the mostly Star Wars related fantasies you've ever had, 500-strong armies of mooks storming an enemy encampment, launching a fleet of fighters supported by capital ships to rain death from above on a planet full of factories, or of course, firing a god damn Death Star.
Compared to other games of it's ilk, the number of options available to you in Planetary Annihilation is astounding. It's a genre which rarely lives up to the "strategy" part of it's name, with only a few tactics available for any particular faction. Thus they devolve into tests of how quickly you can enact those strategies. High level play is seeing how many button presses a minute someone can pull off. There's nuance of course, alight differences in army composition, angles of approach, resource contesting and all that jazz, if there wasn't the StarCraft professional scene wouldn't be as huge as it is. But I don't get all that. It's beyond me. Insane levels of nuance, efficiency and finger dexterity are amazing to behold at the highest levels, but I don't play on those. I don't even play against other players. And when you're at my level, RTS games lose steam very quickly once you've done everything there is to do.
Planetary Annihilation alleviates that drop-off of interest by presenting everyone with the same ridiculous toolbox, with so many different combinations and strategies and counter-strategies that it would take ages to discover and experience all the different elements of the game's strategy. And high-level play is all the better for it too. Finger dexterity and speed are as important as ever, the game even measures these for those who care, but the actual events are so much more clear-cut and easy to understand on a surface level. A player managing to rig a metal planet into a Death Star and systematically destroying every planet in the solar system, forcing everyone who is able to evacuate on to the surface of the Death Star, is an immediately amazing situation weather or not you understand the micromanaging needed to keep the resources and power levels to pull it off.
Which isn't to say it's easy to get into. Managing energy and metal consumption is key, and it's very easy to get carried away with too many factories auto producing units before you have the means to keep up. But it's more easily readable than most games too. Control groups are easier to get to grips with, and automating things is very easy to set up. Micromanaging can be alleviated pretty easily when you know how to defer control. You can set where new units group up after being made in a factory, or even give them basic orders, you can make a small team of builders and task them with just building extractors over every resource node on a planet and just leave them to it. And there is something incredibly satisfying about constructing an absolute machine of an army, and just watching your forces amass in preparation for an assault. Then the entire planet blows up because you didn't take advantage of that automation to expand to other planets and stop the enemy from strapping rockets to the moon.
This is a game that had me completely unironically laughing like a supervillain when a masterplan comes together. When I successfully lure 3 enemy commanders on a wild goose chase across 3 planets, only to wipe out all 3 with a death Star they didn't notice I was building. When I launch a crack team of builders out of a unit cannon to build the planet-destroying Ragnarok titan on the surface of an enemy hive-world. When I teleport my 1000 strong army from planet to planet, razing bases and encampments with barely a lunch break. And that's before I started playing against AI that could put up a fight. I once tried to launch a planet at a Death Star before it could become operational, with ground troops on the surface to keep the enemy on the surface occupied, but they managed to keep it active long enough to shoot my planet rocket out of the sky before impact, before I could destroy one of the catalysts needed to fire it to shut it down again, forcing a change of tactics. That's movie level stuff right there.
All of this framed with some stunning presentation. The game has a wonderful art style, complimented by gorgeous lighting. The shadows that move across the surface of a planet as you build can be breath-taking at times. And the Titan units added in the standalone expansion are a glorious sight to behold. And the soundtrack is one of the best orchestral scores I've heard in years, genuinely memorable tracks that don't just blend into each other as a mass of trumpets and violins. It's very Star Wars, which is appropriate, and makes for the perfect backing to your interplanetary domination.
The singleplayer Galactic War mode is serviceable enough as a way of framing a series of skirmish matches, with cute little stories about the different commanders you fight across the different factions. It tries for a bit of a rogue-lite thing, with different starting commanders capable of building different buildings and units, and the ability to unlock more things to build as well as passive buffs to production, build speed, unit strength etc. Though unlike a rogue-lite, you generally start as something unique and gravitate towards the same capabilities each time. There's no real difficulty increase as you go along either, just standard missions of the same difficulty, and 4 more difficult missions against faction leaders. It's not exactly a deep meta-experience, but it serves well enough to get you playing with all the tools at your disposal over the course of 100 matches.
So yeah, Planetary Annihilation: Titans. A Real-Time-Strategy with a much bigger focus on the strategy, and a billion stupid toys to play with. Well worth your time if the idea of launching moons at planets interests you, and you're willing to learn a bit of resource management and efficiency.
Next week, EDF! EDF! EDF! (Earth Defence Force 4.1: Shadow of New Despair)
Compared to other games of it's ilk, the number of options available to you in Planetary Annihilation is astounding. It's a genre which rarely lives up to the "strategy" part of it's name, with only a few tactics available for any particular faction. Thus they devolve into tests of how quickly you can enact those strategies. High level play is seeing how many button presses a minute someone can pull off. There's nuance of course, alight differences in army composition, angles of approach, resource contesting and all that jazz, if there wasn't the StarCraft professional scene wouldn't be as huge as it is. But I don't get all that. It's beyond me. Insane levels of nuance, efficiency and finger dexterity are amazing to behold at the highest levels, but I don't play on those. I don't even play against other players. And when you're at my level, RTS games lose steam very quickly once you've done everything there is to do.
Planetary Annihilation alleviates that drop-off of interest by presenting everyone with the same ridiculous toolbox, with so many different combinations and strategies and counter-strategies that it would take ages to discover and experience all the different elements of the game's strategy. And high-level play is all the better for it too. Finger dexterity and speed are as important as ever, the game even measures these for those who care, but the actual events are so much more clear-cut and easy to understand on a surface level. A player managing to rig a metal planet into a Death Star and systematically destroying every planet in the solar system, forcing everyone who is able to evacuate on to the surface of the Death Star, is an immediately amazing situation weather or not you understand the micromanaging needed to keep the resources and power levels to pull it off.
Which isn't to say it's easy to get into. Managing energy and metal consumption is key, and it's very easy to get carried away with too many factories auto producing units before you have the means to keep up. But it's more easily readable than most games too. Control groups are easier to get to grips with, and automating things is very easy to set up. Micromanaging can be alleviated pretty easily when you know how to defer control. You can set where new units group up after being made in a factory, or even give them basic orders, you can make a small team of builders and task them with just building extractors over every resource node on a planet and just leave them to it. And there is something incredibly satisfying about constructing an absolute machine of an army, and just watching your forces amass in preparation for an assault. Then the entire planet blows up because you didn't take advantage of that automation to expand to other planets and stop the enemy from strapping rockets to the moon.
This is a game that had me completely unironically laughing like a supervillain when a masterplan comes together. When I successfully lure 3 enemy commanders on a wild goose chase across 3 planets, only to wipe out all 3 with a death Star they didn't notice I was building. When I launch a crack team of builders out of a unit cannon to build the planet-destroying Ragnarok titan on the surface of an enemy hive-world. When I teleport my 1000 strong army from planet to planet, razing bases and encampments with barely a lunch break. And that's before I started playing against AI that could put up a fight. I once tried to launch a planet at a Death Star before it could become operational, with ground troops on the surface to keep the enemy on the surface occupied, but they managed to keep it active long enough to shoot my planet rocket out of the sky before impact, before I could destroy one of the catalysts needed to fire it to shut it down again, forcing a change of tactics. That's movie level stuff right there.
All of this framed with some stunning presentation. The game has a wonderful art style, complimented by gorgeous lighting. The shadows that move across the surface of a planet as you build can be breath-taking at times. And the Titan units added in the standalone expansion are a glorious sight to behold. And the soundtrack is one of the best orchestral scores I've heard in years, genuinely memorable tracks that don't just blend into each other as a mass of trumpets and violins. It's very Star Wars, which is appropriate, and makes for the perfect backing to your interplanetary domination.
The singleplayer Galactic War mode is serviceable enough as a way of framing a series of skirmish matches, with cute little stories about the different commanders you fight across the different factions. It tries for a bit of a rogue-lite thing, with different starting commanders capable of building different buildings and units, and the ability to unlock more things to build as well as passive buffs to production, build speed, unit strength etc. Though unlike a rogue-lite, you generally start as something unique and gravitate towards the same capabilities each time. There's no real difficulty increase as you go along either, just standard missions of the same difficulty, and 4 more difficult missions against faction leaders. It's not exactly a deep meta-experience, but it serves well enough to get you playing with all the tools at your disposal over the course of 100 matches.
So yeah, Planetary Annihilation: Titans. A Real-Time-Strategy with a much bigger focus on the strategy, and a billion stupid toys to play with. Well worth your time if the idea of launching moons at planets interests you, and you're willing to learn a bit of resource management and efficiency.
Next week, EDF! EDF! EDF! (Earth Defence Force 4.1: Shadow of New Despair)
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