Dune: Spice Wars

o jogo é bom, Deus te abençoe sabia que Jesus te ama muito que deu a vida por você❤

I was excited for a new RTS type Dune game finally. I have great memories of Dune Battle For Arrakis on PC and Genesis, Dune 2000 on PC, and even Emperor: Battle For Dune (which worked my poor little pc at the time to the bone). So I was happy to finally get my hands on this title on a sale. Well, while it does have RTS elements, it's got way too much going on playing political games along with managing way too many what I'll just call 'currencies'. I get that some people like overly complex strategy games like this, I'm not one of them. It confused me greatly for the first 2-3 hours of play. But once I finally got the idea of how to play, I started noticing the actual issues: random lag over and over, a loading screen loop that you have to exit the game to load properly, and the worst offence and the straw that broke this camel's back- My last 2 saves refused to load the day after last playing. Would get to 99% then the game would just brick outright. My interest was already waning at this point, so that killed it completely for me and it's now in my folder of games I'll likely never care to try ever again. Just gonna ever hold out and hope that Emperor or Dune 2000 will end up on GoG someday.

This game crashes after about 10 mins every game I play, goes from fps to fpm. The tutorial worked though and I spent a bit of time trying different things to get it to work, this put me over the 2 hour limit for return, sp essentially steam has sold me a broken and unsupported game. Yay for more wealth!

Not bad, but it's a bit bland and lacking personality. I feel like I'm just maxing out stats and then waiting way too long for each game to end. The combat is just terrible with enemies constantly dancing around, atrocious pathfinding, and lackluster units.

Multiple major bugs/game ruining situations come up, I've quit the game a few times over them. The game gets a bit stale in A.I.-games, you can try to make the game fun in various ways - which do work for a while/it is a nice game in many ways. But because of these issues - which many have posted in discussions for years (because reports don't work - i.e. you/or at least I cannot even add save files when submitting), I cannot recommend the game until/IF they're fixed.

Feels like the OG Dune RTS games, but on another level. While there's a bit of a learning curve, the game and it's mechanics are very thought out and enjoyable. After over 120 hours of gameplay (from pre-launch to it's current state), here's a few take aways: * Pros: - Each faction have their own playstyle that is different enough to make replay enjoyable and playing against AI or other players challenging. - The use of the Landsrad voting and Agent/spy network adds a whole new level to the game, providing alternative strategies to win. An example would include using a Landsrad vote to penalize a faction with a stronger military or Choam share. The spy network allows for boons to improve troop performance despite lack of numbers or firepower, and can be used both as a means of offense or a deterrent to keep an army from steam rolling over your territories. - the option to pause the game quickly on single player, provides an opportunity for better setup and to react when you get notified of a raid or other important event. - rewards from the campaign mode make continuing the campaign enjoyable and provide additional replayability because of the ways you can tweak your progress to your play style. *Cons: - Challenging. As I said before, it has a steep learning curb and you may find yourself looking at online guides and restarting games over and over until you understand the full mechanics. Because of this, it is not your typical RTS game and each round can take upwards of one to several hours to complete depending on the difficulty and how often you need to pause to strategize. This can make multiplayer difficult especially when you add an AI opponent that can react much faster than you. - Because of the multiple layers of gameplay (physical progression, utilizing the political system, and taking advantage of the spy network), you may be led into a false sense of security only to find out that you have underestimated your opponent. Even worse, you may realize this too late and find yourself getting assassinated because you didn't put enough points into your political tech tree to provide any counter intelligence. - The save system is odd. You can't exit the game without saving and the game automatically saves periodically, making reverting to past progress almost impossible. - Because of the complexity of the game system, it's not something you can rush through easily. Even if you attempt to speed run missions, you have to plot through wisely to progress and at a bare minimum spend hours to get to comfortable balance where you are making enough Solari/Plastisteel, Intelligence, and Influence to feel like you don't have to constantly micromanage to win. The late game does provide some help with this by allowing you to recruit agents or progress tech trees more quickly, but even then, it will take several rounds to accumulate enough influence to expand your rule and complete whatever objective that's needed to progress through that scenario. Because of the influence system, you can't just sweep through the map, you have to be more calculating and the progress of capturing territory can feel painfully slow. Other thoughts: The Main bases have a lot of hit points and can take a long time to destroy - this can be beneficial but also frustrating as you have to have accumulated an extremely large army or constantly bombard the base while resupplying to avoid losing all your troops. Not all factions are created equal. There are some factions that easier to play (like Atreides and Harkonen) while the others can be more nuanced or challenging to play - with abilities that seem lack luster compared to the main factions. I also feel the variety of units could be improved as even in the late game, you only have access to a small amount of ground and mechanical/aerial units. I think it would also be helpful if you could have the option of providing orders to patrol an area or keep within a territory (as the AI likes to target your units and have them chase them back to their base - losing health and supply along the way). Overall, I still enjoy the game and it still scratches the old school RTS "itch" and if you have the time, you could certainly really get into this game - but be forewarned its not super casual and you have to constantly adjust your play as you go (especially on higher difficulties).

Doesn't quite scratch my itch. Everything just seems so painstakingly drawn out and frustrating. It feels like a Euro style board game in that it seems like it's built around making victory so painstaking, that nobody will be able to outpace their opponents to such a degree that one player dominates. Instead, it feels like you need to put in half an hour to gain the sort of soft cap in size, queue up your research, and then you can watch a show and just check in from time to time, as everything after that is of minimal value. Authority makes sure that your expansion is effectively capped at a certain rate that just keeps growing with each village you take. Forget fast expansion, simply waging war with an opponent doesn't really work, as you're unlikely to be able to maintain a pace beyond maybe a village per week (in-game ofc) on top of the week you have to wait until a village is captured. You can of course skip villages and only capture a few along the way, but that still leaves a week each village to liberate them and an increasingly difficult hopscotch as you keep having to retreat to your nearest village for resupply before again pressing on. Should you persevere, you are then face with the fact that the enemy base is both very powerful and takes forever to crack. You're going to have to rotate your troops and use your entire cap to crush it. I tried it, as the other competitors took advantage of my lack of defenses, and I didn't get very far. Then (as is a theme in this game) my opponent grabbed one of the possible truce options in the landsraad and I gave up. Subterfuge as a whole never really feels powerful, allowing you to purchase certain effects that rarely make much of an impact on the game. The subterfuge victory combines with the above monotony. You must place an agent with a faction, wait while the information level levels up, place an information network (and hope it doesn't get discovered), place another agent, wait again for it to level up to place another information network (and at this point losing an IN will cause your agent to get booted out and the info level to fall). And then you'll be able to launch a loading bar that will require a ton of resources to fund while you throw even more into one-time use troops to maintain the speed of the loading bar and hope they don't find the INs in the meantime, as that effectively dooms your operation (NB, I managed to still get it done by using bene gesserit. The extra info level allowed me to maintain the operation while sending a line of troops to be sacrificed to maintain the progress). Very very tedious, and it didn't really feel like it connected to any mechanic in the game at all. Note as well that both of those methods, you then have to repeat. For. Every. Opponent. The other three victory conditions are then buying up 50% of the CHOOM company, becoming the governor, or the 'time cap' condition of gaining enough hegemony. It says a lot that the games I've played against the AI have so far all at least come close to just defaulting out and I've often considered if that wouldn't just be the most convenient way to always go about things. Just take an area and then watch a movie while you keep one eye on the game so things don't go awry. As for the other two: Buying up CHOOM has a lot of benefits built in and is a great mechanic. Being able to sell it as well is a great option... but the game shoots itself in the foot in it not really being relevant. You can do it to get influence, but late game you're usually drowning in resources and you don't really do much with money except buy CHOOM! The price also keeps rocketing up so it's simply not smart to sell some since you'll only have to pay more to repurchase it. If the game had more stuff you could throw your money into (late game, you're paying more for a single purchase of 5 shares than you are for the limited 'wonder'-tier buildings), then the mechanic would work a lot better. As is, when I tried to chase down CHOOM, it simply became incrementally more difficult to purchase as I clawed my way to the top. Rather than feeling like I was getting close to victory, it felt like the game was trying its best to slow me down, as the price climbed to absurd levels just from me purchasing it. The game even includes an auto purchase that seems to indicate the devs not really understanding their own system, as it buys 5 instead of 20 at a time, and stops as soon as you run out of money. So it explodes the price as fast as possible and stops working when you run out (which you will in only minutes). Instead it is so much better to just manually buy 20. It takes longer, but that results in the price spiking less. Finally you can become the governor. For context, you have 100 votes in the landsraad which you can spread out between the three bills. You can increase that to 250 and you can further boost your power by using influence (the cap on influence can be increased but IIRC the default is 300). Before you become governor, you need to hold some other office. Imagine my surprise when I called a vote on one of those offices, ingeniously that only I was in line for, tossed over 500 votes into the mix only to be defeated by over 600! It turns out that other factions can simply vote no, and that's what everyone did, plus prioritized voting on that. This is how I then gained the rare achievement of having over 1000 votes cast for me (1k just from myself). It is simply what it took. While it was doable to outsmart the AI to gain the necessary offices, the landsraad ALSO has bills that will torpedo your attempt at winning a political victory and I can't imagine that being possible when playing against humans. This felt like what happens in so many board games where the players look around and say: "He's about to win, let's all work together to make sure that doesn't happen." And I simply can't see how any player would be able to outvote three other players given how influence is used for nothing but voting, and so pools up a lot. All of that just makes the game unfun. I found myself pursuing all kinds of things in each game, as each victory type took ages to accomplish. And never in a very active way. Just waiting for the information level to go up, or waiting for enough cash to pool up, or waiting for enough authority to pool up. It was simply very boring.

Good 4x strategy game so far, but even though I knew what I was getting into I was still hoping it would be more of a straight up RTS like Dune II and Dune 2000 - both of which I used to watch my dad play as a kid and looked really fun. Spice Wars is most certainly worth the 13 bucks on sale atm, but if you're looking for gameplay like the ones from the 90s, this isn't it.