Last night was my birthday. Having not had a housewarming or anything, we threw a small party, ate cupcakes and showed off the house.
And blew up spaceships. That's totally a thing with me. We even managed to blow up enemy spaceships, in spite of our weapons officers (Zog and Baden) attempts to damage anythign which isn't moving.
So you pay your $40 to this guy on the net, and you get a site to download the game. The binary is "licensed" for about 6 copies, with no hard licensing or terms other than a basic, just be cool about it kind of attitude.
The server runs on one box (which runs the front viewscreen as well) on a 12' projection screen (it was a birthday present, along with Artemis.) Clients run on 2+ other machines. (Same software, different clicky button on the main screen.)
Each of the clients is assigned one or more of the 6 roles:
1. Helm
2. Weapons
3. Engineering
4. Science
5. Comms
6. Captain
Helm and weapons are the only ones you NEED, and any client can run multiple stations flipping back and forth between them. Engineering handles energy distribution and damage control. Science is the only one with detailed knowledge about the entire sector, and comms gets requests from friendly ships, and can send out messages and orders to other things.
The captain may or may not get a screen, and just gets to look at the viewscreen and shout things. The optional captain's map is an overall sector map.
There are a lot of little design touches that force the console to cooperate besides the captain role:
- The Helm needs help from Science to plot long range courses.
- Weapons needs science to set phaser frequencies and get shield and systems status of enemy ships to know where to hit them.
- Comms can request and accept surrenders, but also needs to talk to weapons as she is the one who asks stations to build nukes, homing torps or ECM.
- Engineering needs to listen to everything going on so they can overcharge and manage cooling for the critical systems. They also have the best knowledge of the Artemis shield status, and the effectiveness of the damage control teams.
While the consoles are pretty simple, the details start getting relatively deep. While at the helm, I could REALLY tell when engineering switched power to my maneuver thrusters while I was navigating an asteroid belt.
But there are other things we were figuring out. If sensors are damaged, you may lose the front viewscreen or have it flash a bit, and science may not be able to scan easily. Comms can taunt enemies and pull them away from space stations.
Mines are proximity devices. Zog tried to go through a minefield, which was the cause of our one death.
Your own mines are proximity, and make sure you warp out after setting them. Zog forgot to tell anyone while dropping a mine.
Nukes affect everything in the area. Zog took our a space station, and Sandi got to relay tons of messages from our ECM attacks near other space stations. They weren't nice.
Missions take about 30-45 minutes, and you can choose from different ships, (We tried one with a missile freighter armed with 8 nukes. Baden got REALLY trigger happy with those, and I would reflexively repeat "No nukes" when in a fight near a station.) and a few mission options.
The basic mission is you, a sector, 4 stations, and a lot of incoming ships hell bent on destruction. You are welcome to also run some transport missions to gain extra nukes and things.
However, Artemis also support XML-based mission scripts. These includes storylines and support for the Comms officer to play audio file messages on the main sound system as incoming messages. The one we tried included some new game elements, like ships that can warp in reinforements, a ram scoop which can collect energy from cruising through a Nebula with shields down, and a greedy admiral unloading and selling our missiles.
Even the base game includes some surprises. There are a number of different ships ripped off from Star Trek. On our second mission, we started hitting this Romulan Warbird. It would show up on some screens and disappear from others, so we ended up with everyone confused and shouting "He's RIGHT THERE!" "There's nothing there" "Wait, he's gone" "Idiots, look at the front viewscreen" "Wait, I see him!"
The Artemis guy is constantly updating the game itself. And there is a pretty avid community around it, including crazies who are building dedicated bridges. We did it on 6 laptops and a Mini-ATX desktop.
There are some other features that are only hinted at. The game supports multiple starships, so you could build a large lan of 30 or so machines and 6 ships flying around, relying on the comms officers to coordinate. The game has an update/ping rate of 250ms, so it really isn't very resource intensive at all. The 3d screens do require a somewhat modern laptop. Zogs 5 year old HP would chug a bit, so we left it as a captain's screen. And we had 3 macbooks running the game in Wine with the only glitch being one machine that needed to run in windowed mode for some reason.
And the Helm supports a flightstick. Highly reccommended, as it allowed us to really deal with homing torpedos.
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