Universal Combat CE

Tenho esta versão gratuita, pelo site do fornecedor, alem de outras versões mais antigas. Logo vale a pena joga-los.

There are times I wish the Steam review system was more than just “recommended/not recommended”. Reviewing this game is one of those times. Universal Combat is the latest in Derek Smart’s Battlecruiser 3000 series, coming after Battlecruiser Millenium Gold. Universal Combat itself has seen quite a few iterations, of which this one (Universal Combat Collector’s Edition V2) is the latest. UCCE promises a lot. Space combat, vehicle combat, first person combat, open world, big sandbox, planetary and space environments, campaign, etc. In a general sense it does deliver on all of those, but that’s an incomplete assessment. This is primarily a game about commanding large spaceships. It works best when played from that perspective. The space aspect of the game is an iteration of the general gameplay that appeared in both Battlecruiser 3000AD and Battlecruiser Millenium. It doesn’t add anything new to the formula. There’s a very large selection of starships available to choose from. Unfortunately the systems and deck layouts are practically identical, so you really don’t see much difference in general gameplay. However the ships do vary in loadouts and capabilities. Depending on how you want to play the game will largely dictate your craft choice. The main differences are weapons/turret loadouts, personnel assignments (how many marines/medics/engineers/etc. are on the ship), shields and armour, speed/maneuverability and hyperdrive recharge times. Large carriers for example are slow with slow drive recharge (90+ seconds with 2-3 minute transit times), but have a full complement of shuttles, fighters, and troops. Cruisers are faster and more heavily armed but have less capabilities outside of direct ship-to-ship combat. Like it’s predecessors a lot of this game revolves around managing the logistics of a capital ship. Gameplay is slower paced, especially with large ships that take a longer time for hyperdrive transit and jump charge time. Capital ship space combat won’t “wow” you, but it’s serviceable and does on occasion produce some fairly intense skirmishes -especially when multiple capital ships are involved. The AI is serviceable. It has some bugs here and there, but it’s also capable of playing smarter than we often see in these types of games. For example, enemies will actually retreat when the battle starts going against them, which can result in a multi-system tailchase if you intend to pursue them. Space fighter combat still has the same issues previous games in the series had: it’s far, far too fast and fighters are so incredibly nimble it makes it very difficult to actually hit anything with weapons. As it stands unless you want to try and take on cap ships manually, space to space fighter combat is probably best left to the AI. On that note -your ship crew AI. You start the game with a crew of noobie officers. They’re barely competent (especially your fighter pilots.. it’s amazing they made it out of flight school). This can cause some frustration early in the game as you’ll be spending a lot of time micromanaging things. However, as your officers gain experience, they start doing more on their own and you’ll end up rather surprised at just how well your ship starts to run without your direct intervention. They’ll make intelligent crew assignments and rotations, your chief engineer will initiate repairs, etc. It takes some time to get to that point but it’s rewarding when it does. One huge negative for this game in my opinion is the time required to repair your ship. For minor repairs it’s not a huge deal, but for large repairs you could be waiting several hours in real-time to get your ship fully repaired. This is often enough to make you either a) use cheats to speed up the game, or b) restart an earlier save. For me this is probably the worst deliberate design decision in the game. Save often, especially before doing something stupid or high-risk. On the other hand, having your ship ambushed and beat up far from home can really add to the intensity. Trying to limp a damaged and combat compromised ship through enemy territory to a safe haven is a lot of fun. The ground stuff is where this game starts to fall short. By the dev’s own admission, it wasn’t polished to the point the space combat was, for various reasons. There’s some neat concepts here: An absolute ton of different vehicles to commandeer or order around, many different ground bases and cities on planets to fight over, a good amount of control over individual units and is one of the few games where you can effectively implement a combined operations combat mission. The results though are mediocre. Ground combat isn’t a spectacle worth watching and maintaining control over your forces can be a chore. It’s also going to often come with moderate-to-high losses and the payoff isn’t immediately obvious. Realistically, executing an entire planetary campaign is extremely time consuming. What’s worse, ships best suited to space combat (supercruisers) are often ill suited to ground combat because of the lack of support vehicles and marine capacity. This means you really have to determine the focus of your play right out the gate. This can be mitigated in late game when you gain command authority over other assets (yea, at high enough rank you can actually order friendly forces around, being your own fleet commander), but it takes many hours to get to that point. Still, the ground stuff is a neat -if buggy and incomplete- part of the game. One thing that cannot be emphasized enough is that you must review this game’s documentation. The tutorial alone is over 90 pages. Go through it. If you don’t, you’ll miss a bunch of less-obvious-but-still-very-important aspects to this game. Reading other reviews of UCCE and looking through some forum threads, 80% of the issues people have playing this game are answered in the documentation. If you don’t want to read any documentation, just skip this game. You won’t be able to figure it out just by clicking through. Having said that, while the documentation is thorough, it’s not always well organized and some critical points are buried (for example, the only reference I found to losing experience points was buried in a single line in one of the appendices, despite it being hugely critical to progress in the game). It also hasn’t been fully updated for UCCE V2, so there’s some out-of-date information. In this day and age most gamers expect an interactive in-game tutorial. This game has none. It’s a PDF you’ll need to follow while playing the tutorial scenario. It can be viewed in-game but it’s less than ideal. I can forgive this through the perspective of a game released in 2004, but given the amount of updates this game has had an in-game tutorial would help a lot of players get into the game. The music soundtrack is really quite good, while the sound FX are serviceable. Overall, there’s a lot to do in UCCE. It’s a fairly large and involved sandbox that doesn’t hold your hand (more like pushes you into the deep end), but it also doesn’t restrict you. The double edge sword is that you have little guidance and a lot of the game’s mechanics aren’t obvious. This is exasperated by the general slow pace of the game, where things happening in the “background” aren’t apparent. Even after all these years it’s still one of the only games of its kind, and the scope is truly ambitious. It’s worth playing if you go into it with the right mindsight and are forgiving of some bugs, some jank, and some incomplete mechanics. It’s an old game and it shows. If you’re looking for a quick combat fix, an action-packed experience, or a game that’s easy to pick up and play, skip this game.

My first space simulator.

Universal Combat is a very cool idea a full out space sim. You can be many types of caste from military, to explorer, to planetary defense, to a fighter pilot.etc There is loads of planets and star systems to explore and fly to. Its a very Niche game Theres alot of learning that needs to be done inorder to get the full experience of the game and this is not a faint of heart game. Learning how a ship works is integral to operating it, Allocating resources is important so you dont run out of ship fuel, parts to repair your ship .etc I would say the game is an extremely ambisous project and it shows with the all the systems that are implemented into it. However theres major problems that needs to be fixed in order for this game to succeed. 1) The random game crashes. ( This happens on Roam very frequent) When playing a Elite Fighter I noticed sometimes when I try to jump into hyper space the game just crash. (had similar problems as a merchant) The game is currently unplayable in Roam with these crashes. 2)Dated graphics. Where this game is so niche you need to have near top of line graphics to attract as many players as pausible. This game begin development in mid 2000s and the graphics show it. Maybe its time to update the game engine to provide potential and current players with.

low price and fun