The attackers enter from whatever side of the territory they’re neighboring, and they use the roads in the city to move around colonists leave their workplaces and run across the city to fight back. When troops from another colony attack, the battles unfold in real-time. Nowhere is the importance of the game’s mid-scale perspective clearer than a hostile encounter with another colony. Inevitably, the borders of the growing colonies will run up against each other, and someone will strike first. The region has a finite number of territories. The colonists will become upset and threaten to rebel. You can shuttle colonists around the territories to even out the numbers, but there are only so many housing complexes or cultural institutions you can build to placate people before the realities of unchecked expansion settle in. One of the greatest problems, maybe more than direct competition, is how to manage the anxieties of overpopulation. The neutral advisor Oolan doles out encyclopedic knowledge to all colonistsīuilding a colony is an act of constant, almost reckless growth – laying farmland across every field in area for food, constructing mines in the iron-rich mountains. After all, it’s the reason you’re there to begin with. The game gives a broad view of the area but maintains your attention on the society you’re growing. Zooming in reveals the lush, granular detail of the environment and your city, down to the roads paved between structures, the cars driving on them, and animated icons for the colonists working at your factories and energy plants. The colonies control these territories as whole units, staking out the entire chunk of land when they start a settlement there. The randomly generated features of the region are grouped into territories with declarative, epic names – Redemption Cliffs, the Bog of Hope, and, less poetically, the Nice Place with Trees. Ostensibly, your goal is to take over the entire planet, but the game smartly keeps focused on a smaller region of Gallius IV. Rather than try to rework the format too drastically, Deadlock puts attention on the planet you’re colonizing and the impact that its physical and political geography have. The terrain in this sector of Gallius IV offers a plethora of resources – and lightning rods for conflict Technologies like Chaos Computers and Cortex Scanner sound cool as hell, but at a glance, they don’t give much indication of their purpose besides more resources or military power or whatever. The expeditionary sci-fi story translates well to this genre about spreading across a new world, though sometimes the futuristic elements obscure what you’re progressing towards. Extreme environmental events will rock the planet, from plagues and earthquakes damaging cities to ion storms that block out the orbital mapping satellites. (The humans landed too, and they dress like explorers from the Italian Renaissance, appropriately on-the-nose for a game about colonization.) An eighth alien species orbits the planet, profiting off the war by selling resources and information on the black market, though turning to them will lower a colony’s morale. The seven colonizing species have unique cultural traits, like the anteater-esque Uva Mosk, who forage for resources at an accelerated rate. The space colonization theme goes off in a slightly more fantastical direction from there. Over time, they research new areas of science, discovering advancements in technology and more powerful weaponry. The colonists use labor and natural resources to build cities and take care of the upkeep for their empire. If Deadlock isn’t a direct copy of expansionist strategy games like the Civilization series, at least it owes them a huge debt for liberally borrowing their themes and appearance, even the style of their interfaces. The Re’lu capital city, showing their unique pyramid architecture
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