Gratuitous Space Battles Demo Released

Wow... this game is extremely addicting. I have been playing the last four hours non-stop. It's my bedtime already! Each battle is so deep, thanks to all the different weapon effectiveness regarding shields, armor, defence systems etc. No one ship is a jack of all trades. I have frigates, cruisers and fighters for all different roles. SO much fun! I spent about 30-45 minutes watching battles, and the remainder of the four hours designing ships, reading statistics and trying to improve my ships. Learning the balance during ship design is awesome too! Weight, power and crew requirements make it a constant balancing act.

TIP: ditch armor, shields are far superior (so far) :)

Cool, can't wait to try this out! I looks like a really cool strategy game.
Wish it was on Steam though.

Don't forget to mention the Impulse Beta. I preordered this last month and have been playing the Beta of the game.

For some reason, I always pictured this game as being priced ~ $10...Maybe $15 at the most.
$20-23 seems high for this Niche Product extracted from an already niche product.
Nothing against the game, the trailers seemed kinda cool. But seriously, 3rd Tier Retail pricing? ($60/50, $50/40, $30/20)

I am checking this out now - this game looks like lots of fun. :)

This game + AI Fleet War = Gratuitous Epic Strategy Space Battles!

Someone just needs to combine the depth of building your own ships with the ability to micro-manage as easily as you can in AI:FW and I would buy that game in a heart beat!

This sounds like an old 3X game that let you design ship classes and send out fleets to conquer other star systems. Wish I could remember the name. It was old, before MOO and I think mostly text based. It was turned based, had like a diplomacy phase, build phase etc. I think it had "Star" in the name and I may have played it on the C64, can't remember. It wasn't Star Control or Star Fleet Battles...

Anyone know?

everywhere but steam?

My concern with the demo is that it wouldn't give you a big picture of the game. (ie a demo that sucks at demo-ing)

So I played it and I can totally recommend the demo at least. Shit does indeed blow up, but something I didn't expect at all was the writing. There's tons of good flavor text all over the place, although its all fairly silly but you know, it's a game called Gratuitous Space Battles, not Serious & Boring Space Battles.

It's essentially what should have been Master of Orion 3's battle mode. You can tell each ship what to prioritize in terms of targets, and there are just 3 scales of ships, fighters, frigates (mid-size semi-expendable) and cruisers ie capital ships, so it's not tough to Ctrl-select all fighter screening frigates and turn their anti-fighter preference up to 100% or whatever.

It seems like there's lots of nuance to all the ship design stuff... well, there better be because that's pretty much the entire game. But it seems well done.

Oh, and there are post battle reports! This is more important than it sounds, because you can see what ships were the most/least effective... so if you see a "0 shots landed score", then you know you have a turd of a ship, and not just because it died early.

I'm not totally sure about the $20 price tag,but then again, how many terrible terrible games have we paid $50/$60 for? Hopefully the developer finds the game successful enough to do some expansions or post-release support. I'll probably pick it up after the crazy holiday rush settles down.

Concept seems really fun, will check this out later :O

Awesome, was waiting for this.