You can trade with your rivals, and that’s about the most support you can expect from them, even if you do play nice otherwise. The other factions all default to belligerence with you, which is both convenient in terms of development (the diplomacy in Spice Wars is laughably simple) but also appropriate for a game in which genuine alliances should be an impossibility. The spice tax quota is a good abstraction of the way these factions are all vying to exploit the planet out of its precious resource the quickest. There are hints that the developers tried to work with what they could. Like it was Lord of the Rings or Warhammer rather than… Dune.
![pokemon crystal dust gba pokemon crystal dust gba](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/eyUAAOSwkBJh9bCk/s-l400.jpg)
It behaves like a conversion of pulp fiction rather than literature. This is the problem that Dune: Spice Wars finds itself in. You can’t just strip the philosophy out of Herbert’s text and expect the texture of the thing to remain the same. The “science fiction” stuff is secondary, making Dune more like a Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus novel than Tolkien’s fantasy. This is a book that is not only an epic piece of science fiction literature, but it’s a particularly dense book that predominantly exists as a thesis on fascism, religion, humanity, politics and environmentalism. It took two enormously talented filmmakers to fail before the third finally delivered the vision that even belongs in the same ballpark as Herbert’s book.
![pokemon crystal dust gba pokemon crystal dust gba](https://apkloo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/pokemon-crystal-dust-1.png)
However (and you knew there was a “but” coming)…ĭune is difficult. I have genuinely enjoyed my time playing Dune: Spice Wars. It’s also good looking (as far as barren wastelands can look good), and the music is excellent and atmospheric. You have some decent defensive options available to you, but in general you’re going to be focused more on the attack, just to stay on top of the spice quotas.Īs a game, it all comes together really nicely, is the point I’m making here. At first, having a single spice harvester will be more than enough to hit this yield, but the quota increases with each period, and before you know it you’re going to need 2, 3 or more spice fields, and that’s when you’re going to start to run into conflict with the other factions, who are going to be every bit as aggressive as you are. You’re given a “spice” quota to meet each in-game period (spice being the famous resource that the universe converges on planet Arakkis to exploit, even though the planet is almost impossible to live on).
![pokemon crystal dust gba pokemon crystal dust gba](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fATLZou2__A/maxresdefault.jpg)
Just like how in Lord of the Rings things were weighted towards skirmishes being furious and over quickly, Dune has a large map, but forces you to be extremely and rapidly expansive. In action, this works like Lord of the Rings, too, with the focus on a balanced core rather than something expansive.įinally, Dune: Spice Wars downright demands extreme aggression. Thematically this makes sense, since, Dune is grim-and-gritty stuff, so the idea is that you should be scratching out an existence for your little towns and populations, not filling luxury cities with art galleries and football fields. I also love the way the game is deliberately limited in terms of buildings and unit types. I love carefully cultivating an elite team of warriors that can cut a swathe through an enemy’s flank (I wasn’t so happy when a sand worm swallowed one of my precious units, though). I love the way that military units are organised into small squads and, as they are successful in combat, they level up and become more powerful. Nothing to elevate it to Crusader Kings or even Civilization, but there are tech trees and some basic diplomacy built into the strategy that you will also need to manage.ĭespite having those elements, so much of what I love about the game is the Lord of the Rings-like design and action. It is, fundamentally, a RTS title, but with some light 4X elements. I’ve been playing the Early Access build of the game for two weeks now, and the best way I can frame it is that it’s what I would have expected if the Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth games had continued being produced.