Neptune’s Pride 2: Triton
Iron Helmet Games | HTML5
Imagine a real-time strategy game, with some Risk-like battle mechanics, and a spacey 4x theme. Then slow it down so each tick happens every twelve hours and games take around a week or more to finish. Congratulations, you’ve got Neptune’s Pride 2!
Neptune’s Pride 2: Triton (which I will mercifully call NP2 for the rest of this review) is one of those games that sits on the blurry edge between board game and video game. Is the digital version of Carcassonne a video game? If there had been a board game version of NP2 first, would we call it a digital board game? I’m not sure, but it’s interesting that both mediums seem to be influencing the other.
At its core, NP2 is fairly simple. You have planets (the game refers to them as stars), and you have ships. Stars can be invested in through economy (earns you money), industry (produces ships), and science (speeds up research). Research serves to enhance various facets of your empire — for example, researching increasing levels of weapons makes your ships stronger in combat, while banking increases the amount of money you earn each tick.
Speaking of ticks, the game clock ticks over once every 12 hours, which is when your economy produces the money you need to spend on investing in your stars. At any time, you can send your ships hurtling across the galaxy, but they travel extremely slowly. Two stars that are very close together may take 2-3 hours for the travel to complete. And that’s pretty much the entire game. It plays out a lot like Risk — there’s an initial landgrab, and then posturing, prodding, kingmaking, and backstabbing. In fact, the designer specifically has designed the game to be focused on diplomacy (you can trade research techs, donate money, and generally conspire).
The premise is really interesting — a real-time game where you don’t need to check in more than twice a day. In reality though, to win you really need to be on your guard at all times. Someone launching a surprise attack against you at 1am that will arrive at 5am means you need be paying attention, and it ends up being fairly taxing. Mechanics-wise, there are some issues I’ve found from playing, particularly around allowing players to have a shot at overtaking the leader. Similar to Risk, once someone gets ahead, it can be hard to have any real chance at taking them down. Even if you build up a massive force of ships, since travel takes such a long time, as long as your opponent is paying attention and hasn’t stretched themselves too thin, they can easily respond to an attack by repositioning their fleet within their homeworld. Defenders receive a combat advantage as well, which means the right thing to do is to slowly and incrementally press your advantage by grinding out more and more planets, getting further ahead in economy, industry, and science, and generally making for a bit of a boring game.
Still, the game is worth playing, if only as a glimpse into a possible new genre of games. The idea of a low time investment RTS that can be played socially is really interesting, and with more interconnected platforms for games, the audience will likely be there.
