The Fleets of Sol

Clunky controls and sluggish movement underlies a fun little game worth your time if on special.

I saw this in my library and couldn't remember what it was, I went to the store page and it sounded interesting so I downloaded it and gave it a whirl.

Basically this game is "what if Battlestar Galactica was both boring and just generally awful".

Pros:
-reasonably nice basic concept (the whole fleet on the run thing).
-some of the ship designs are quite nice.

Cons:
-Boring repetative gameplay (some times you warp in somewhere there just isn't anything there, unsure if this is a bug).
-Repeated ship designs (the nyx fighter seems to be the corvette model but smaller, the hades and deimos are the same model (with the deimos still having hades written on the model so its not just that they are a fighter and strike varient of the same craft)).
-Bad controls, (it doesn't really feel like you are controlling your units in any real way, there isn't a way to drag and grab a bunch of units (or they don't tell you and it isn't obvious) which has been a basic control method since the 90s)
-Unit building (units build in real time even if you are in your base, I could understand if like the research units might take a certain number of jumps to build, and this would increase the strategic thought in the game, but its real time, this makes sense if you are building them in battle but the rest of the time it doesn't).
-Ugly UI, (the UI is confusing and ugly as all hell, it looks like the kind of game people get suckered into buying on their phones with those videos of people not really playing them or unrelated breasts).
-Pop in, (I have a reasonably modern computer that was built to play games (admitadly towards strategy and sims more then FPS's) and units pop in and out of existance, its like they have cloaks as they just suddenly appear when you are right on them).

All in all I would not recommend this, I suspect that this game will go back to the limbo of my uninstalled library till I forget how bad it is again in a few years. Compare it to say Homeworld a game that has a very similar concept but was done so much better back in 1999 and the approching 20 year old game plays and looks way better.

If you're looking for the next Homeworld, this isn't it. If you're looking for a game that gives you some random, quick scenarios, this one's not too bad, but it is unfinished.

Gameplay

This game is *not* a three-degrees-of-freedom game. The space battles always begin with your (small and intentionally limited) fleet in a parade column, and all battles take place on a level plane. Your goal is to get around 50,000 people for a mass exodus from Sol to a new home, while running from an enemy faction that jumps in ships to hunt your fleet. Similar to FTL, theres a jump timer, though unlike FTL, the "clock keeps running" even if an area is clear. Enemies can appear in any scenario randomly, given enough time.

The controls are extremely clunky. If a ship moves behind the right-hand-panel control interface, clicking a ship icon will instead either do nothing or (on double-click) focus the camera on the ship that went behind the panel. Health percentage/bars are not displayed, so a ship must be either selected or the aforementioned control panel must be open to get real data on how damaged a ship is. A damaged ship may not display particle damage in a meaningful way, and a healed ship still can show physical damage until the next jump. There is no way to see which friendly units are *really* yours or controlled by the basic AI. Even selected, some units look like they are yours because they will be once you jump again.
That last bit is a *big* problem. Right-clicking a unit behaves as you would expect; your selected unit moves to it and engages as appropriate (repair, attack, etc). Unfortunately, left-clicking changes the target of your selected unit without telling it to move and change actions. This affects deployed ordinance. This means that if you order a cruise-missile barrage, then accidentally select a friendly vessel, the missiles will take a sharp turn and move toward the friendly ship. Thankfully, the friendly AI is too dumb to target you for doing it, but you can accidentally destroy friendly assets this way.

Ship manufacturing is broken. There are two classes of ship that appear when in home base that can be built once you have researched appropriate technology, but selecting them only seems to build more of the other craft that appear under them in the build menu.

Enemy ships are designed in the curved, aggressive manner of Cylon Raiders, which underscores the sensation that the devs wanted to make a game that felt like the 2000's version of BSG, but they didn't quite pull it off.

The Research tiers are a little laughable. Outside of certain capital-tier changes that play out as added abilities, most of the research paths only have 2-3 nodes. This isn't horribly far from what you might expect, but it brings to question why there's a whole menu dedicated to it.

BUGS

This section is a big part of why I have to give this game the thumbs-down.

1. The bombers use the wrong model; they use the model of the medium fighter you start the game with
   
2. The aforementioned issue with targeting
   
3. The graphics are passable, but dated, and they create a bug when snapping from Fullscreen to Windowed where the Windowed resolution "squishes" the image to maintain the setting from widescreen
   
4. Ships will fire weapons "through" friendly ships, which doesn't work at all; the shots actually damage the friendly ship instead.
   
5. Ships will grind themselves to death via collision if a destination is blocked by another ship, rather than shift around them.
   
6. The missions where you jump into a supply field guarded by turrets are just empty space with no supplies and no turrets
   
7. The missions where there are Drones deposit your foremost ship directly in the midst of the drone (read: mine) field and nearly instantly kill it.
   
8. Scripted events where ships jump in and out just lead to crowded space where the ships don't leave
   
9. Jumping back home while under attack can cause the ships to appear at long range in your home base. If this isn't a bug, I'd be surprised, but it does create an interesting element.
   
[*] "Stress" only goes down when jumping in Green Alert conditions. It goes up during combat, each time damage is received, when fighters die, and when jumping under Yellow or Red Alert conditions. These conditions are set before the jump and effect how quickly your ships can respond to changes in the next "level". This means an alarming number of capital ships will only be with your fleet for one or two jumps, and the "Final Journey" takes several jumps, making it nearly impossible to complete.

I would recommend this game to fans of "space games" that are looking for something straightforward that has some cool capital ship battles, but is skant on overall effects and abilities.

GRAPHICS
The game has a nice overall design, however as far as graphical fidelity goes other games in the space genre (X series, Rogue Galaxy, etc..) will likely have impressed for their initial visuals more, however the ability to move the camera pretty much anywhere you want (simple pan, dolly, rotate features are present and easy to use..) you can frame the action anyway you want. A cockpit view for certain ships adds some immersion.

You will see the same missile patterns, explosions, and "jump / warp" animations, but the initial effects are all pretty cool. The game depicts desolate, never-ending space well, however their could be more planets and other outer space phenomena scattered around the sectors to appear more immersive...

GAMEPLAY
A rogue-like gameplay progression as you jump to subsequent sectors deciding whether to return to home base and salvage what you have acquired (and take a break to repair with your constantly-changing fleet..) or continue making jumps to different situations (akin to DarkStar One's sector jumping, arriving, being attacked immediately etc..) adds some panicked moments trying to take down an opposing fleet, as you wait for your abilities to level up.

To level abilities such as your fleet's shields or to unlock new fighter jets, repair freighters, and the ability to see a description of where you are next jumping to are all unlocked via "X number of sector jumps" so say I want higher shields on my capital ships, it will take 5 sector jumps to complete the ability unlock, to finish unlocking the ability I will have to endanger myself by doing a numer of sector jumps, and with no traditional save feature I may jump to a situation that wipes me out before the ability is finished researching.

The random encounters you have as you progress with subsequent jumps provide the opportunity to rescue other freighters and capital ships along the way, who join and expand your fleet.

BAD STUFF
The capital ships / corvettes / stations all move fairly clunkily it seems, beyond making sweeping moves toward their waypoints. Some enemy ships snag on one another goofily (it seems to be the same model that it happens to..) and then neither is able to move anymore so you can wipe them both out fairly easily. Suffice to say the game has its share of jankiness.

I still find combat in the game a bit confusing overall as to whether my ships are actually attacking whom I'm telling them to, beyond a vague "Direct (Unit) Fire" option on each of your constructed fighter jets, there isn't much indication that ships are going where you've told them to beyond watching if the swarm of fighters approaches the other capital ships etc. Though I haven't played the game a ton, so maybe I am missing an indicator.

Some voice acting would have been nice, as it is present in the studio's other title Battle of Sol so its absence here is a bit strange. The UI is simple and effective.

OVERALL
Overall, for all the game offers and with its modest pricepoint, it maintains my interest for longer than many other space games. What is present may be a bit thin on complexity and the graphics ~could~ use a little more polish or higher rez/more effects /lights etc... what is present is quality entertainment, especially if you are a fan of deep space sci fi / capital ship battles and the like.

I picked up this game on sale for only 1.99 after having played its other separate / side game the Battle of Sol ( a game in the same universe I also recommend but with strictly space flight combat, no RTS, and chapter-based storylines..) . After finding the storyline behind Battle of Sol and the overall gameplay to be enjoyable I figured I would give this one a try as well. At first after playing briefly I feared the game would be way too complex and heavy into tutorials and micro managey bullshit that often plagues other "Space Strategy" games for me, as I prefer them to be a little more straight-forward ala Colony Wars/Rogue Galaxy/DarkStar One etc...

However, as I'm not often a big fan of RTS games I found this game to have the right pacing between letting the battles happen and just admiring the visuals of the units themselves. In many other RTS games I find I spend a ton of time zoomed way too far out just staring at bland icons meant to represent my massive fleet moving through space. Thankfully this game includes simple camera controls with mouse and keyboard that allow you to navigate the action and repair your capital ships as needed. Controller support seems limited and like a wack way to play this particular game, which is more a result of the genre than by bad programming from the developers per se. (i.e. the Battle of Sol spinoff game by the same dev has better controller fluidity, but is a space combat / pilot game, not RTS)

This one is a bit of a tough sell... It has gorgeous pew-pew cinematic moments, so if you're looking for a gorgeous pew-pew cinematic moment generator, this is the game for you.

If you're looking for deep, engaging, or strategic gameplay, thoug, this won't be your beast. The controls just feel a little sluggish, and overall the game feels unfinished. That's a shame too, because the combat presentation is absolutely gorgeous.

So should you buy it? Look- its like this. This game isn't polished, and it isn't perfect, but for the sale price I say yes, even if thats just to support the development team with a teensy weensy bit to motivate them to make something else. With a little love and a little care this could be a great game. Hopefully the devs will keep the series going and put a little more depth into the fleet side of this Sol series.

Right off the bat, I can say that while its not objectively terrible, its not really fun. There's glimmers of potential here and there, but have been sorely wasted.

The gameplay loop is very... Limited, with the player directing around handfuls of ships at a time to try and either complete an objective, or last a minute. Many objectives don't clearly state which is your end goal, unfortunately. One of the common encounters, a scouting party, simply says your under attack. If you wipe out the initial forces, and wait around, some more will show up. If you leave, there's no indication that you've failed, or that it was expecting you to leave.

The scale is also unfortunately limited. while I can understand putting a cap on capital ships, the game will also cap your fighters, and automatically decommission some, without player input on which, if you jump with what it deems to be too many. This limit isn't accurately indicated, as you can have more fighters than the build menu permits you to make with no warning (And it'll happen frequently as ships join your fleet). The straight render distance is also limited. While it makes sense that fighter craft get reduced to icons easily, larger capitol ships will quickly vanish out to be replaced with a small icon when the camera is still quite close.

There's also no real meta or planning to your jumps. Whenever you do jump, your options are to jump to an unknown location, or home. No way whatsoever to attempt to control your goal. Not that resource management is very important either, I'm afraid, as fuel and salvage are both completely abundant. As long as you don't get your flagship too beaten up before you get more capital ships, your pretty much set for the rest of the game, especially as your home base generates passive income every jump.

Ultimately, the game has bones, but it doesn't have any meat. What little exists is solid, more or less, but there's just so little depth or content to any of it, at all.

4/10: The game works, runs well, but doesn't really deliver on any of its potential at all. Maybe for a buck or two, but even at the $5 sale, it just wasn't worth it. Save yer ten bucks, buy a pizza, it'll last longer and bring you more satisfaction.

Not what I expected (in a bad way). There isn't much to this game, I was pretty bored with it in about an hour or two. I may give it another chance in the future, but I can't recommend it for anyone, unless you're buying it for $1 or $2.

Great idea but very poorly executed - I feel robbed!

Battle Camera is broken in many ways and doesn't respond to you.
Some missions are broken and doesn't work.
HUD & Interface is horrible. If you have a fleet of more then 10 ships it is almost impossible to pick the one you want. Sometimes the graphics on certain ships disappear after a sector jump.
Battles are very very very repetitive - nothing exciting happens, and it is impossible to try new strategies in new battles, cause the same exact thing happens in all battles. You ask you capital ship to fire a volley of rockets at an enemy ship. The enemy ship explodes. You wait five seconds and repeat....

Do not buy this game!

Sadly there is no maybe or tentative option to these things, only yes or no. With that in mind I say Yes but with reservations.

Having played around with this a little while I always keep coming back to the idea that this is a tablet game. Maybe it actually it is, maybe it isn't, honestly didn't care enough to look that up.

The game looks decent enough but controls like.. [Insert appropriate metaphor here]. Not hotkeys than I can find for ship selection, clicking in the list focuses the camera when I don't want it to, trying to find an individual ship to select to activate any special abilities in the middle of a clusterfuck is next to impossible, especially smaller ships.

A huge opportunity for something amazing was missed here, the description gives the impression of some vast universe and everyone in it is out to get you. Not true, you jump from small arena box to small arena box with no choice except Unknown or Homebase (Probes and research eventually open this to 3 choices or home). Still just little arena boxes though.

Everything always starts off within shooting range, no time to really move your fleet, no need/use for any form of tactical play, launch fighters, set weapon power to max, fight with a bad UI to click ships and launch missile/plasma/whatever abilities. (The arena boxes and this bit are why this feels so much like a tablet game).

All that said though, when this game is on sale for a few bucks it may still be worth your time. You probably won't fall in love with it, it won't be something you'll brag to your friends about and I highly doubt you'll still be playing this in 6 months time, yet you may get a few decent hours out of it.

TL:DR: A tentative recommendation at a hefty discount, tablet style game/UI that could potentially pass a few hours.

Well, it's not really that good. The conept seems neat, but the UI is very.. sloppy. Buttons don't really react when you click them, and the feed back isn't good on them, no beeping, and its not intuitive. And I don't mean like, intuitive as its advanced, its really NOT advanced, like "Repair" .. but does it repair? I don't know, nothing happens.. no feed back when I click it. You tell fighters to attack, and... do they? sometimes... mostly not, no beeping, clicking, no combat chatter, nothing. You really just kinda watch the battles. And they are really bad battles, mostly with icons fighting instead of actual ships. I'll be honest, its a bad game. Sure its early access, but they said they are planning to leave early access in a month and this game is NO WHERE NEAR close to a 'game'. More like a sloppy tech demo.

I can understand why some people might enjoy this game, however I had instances where no damage was being done to the last unit on the screen, the gameplay was just -not- fun for me, and I had several moments when I would jump into a region and nothing would happen. No enemies, nothing.

Not for me.

Neat idea, poor execution. The battles are repetative. Jump in, lauch salvos at the same enemies, rinse, repeat. Ship control is excrutiating. Must select each individual ship to set target. And for some reason my flagship will move in the opposite direction as to where I want it to go. Annoying staticy sound effects.

This is a game that reminds me a lot like Battlestar Galactica, where you get to command the fleet yourself. While in early access, the game has a lot of nice features, which I recommend you try out for yourself. Bear in mind that currently the game engine falters late-game, and too many ships on screen may crash your game. Hopefully this gets fixed later on.

Great game and is great fun to play for many reasons some I will list below:

1. Many different events to keep you intrested.
2. Challanging Enermy AI (the enermy is not stupid).
3. Also a good Allied AI that uses abillities as well.
4. Research is at a steady pace and well balances.
5. You ships weapons only target the correct ships there designed to kill, such as your large weapons on your command ship will only target large enermy ships and not waste time trying to hit fighters etc.
6. Each ship has well balanced skills and stats why still making it that you are not over powered
7. Regular updates that add new content to the game.
8. A Developer that listenings to the players and is in constant contant.
9. Realistic, which makes this game great, for example you may come across transport carrying civilians that you may want to try and rescue but you might finid yourself out numbered and forced to make a decision, risk trying to save them all or put the safetly of your fleet first.
10. No risk, no gain, sometimes you have to take risks to get good rewards, such as answering a destress call, sometimes it could mean new friends or sometimes it could be a trap to lure you in.

All together these 10 points and more in my opinion make this game great and I am happy to support it 100% of the way :)

“The Fleets of Sol” is an action-filled RTS/RTT set of course in some far flung galaxy, a long, long time ago (perhaps). From what was initially an interesting take on “BSG”’s episode “33” (the first episode of Season One), where you must enter a sector of space and rescue transports and/or engage enemy supply stations/fleets. The player has 90 seconds before the FTL drives spool up and in that time the player has to survive what can be an onslaught of enemy craft. Survive that, attend your fleet and jump. But don’t leave it too long to jump, as more enemies are on their way.
As I said, ‘initially’ this was about it. The Devs aren’t happy to sit on their laurels, though and the game has grown, and keeps growing with asteroid fields to contend with, attacks on your home base to defend against and now commanders and pilot attributes added. Next, full-fledged missions are being implemented. With each patch/build, and they are fast and furiously with these, the Devs not only welcome feedback but actively seek it, so much so that the game feels very much like a community-driven project. And the game just keeps improving as a result. The graphics, using the Unreal 3 Engine can look ark and a little ‘muddy’ at times, but even these are being constantly tweaked and addressed. I don’t remember even “Homeworld” receiving this much love when it first came out, and many gamers caved on that title as the difficulty wore on many gamers. There are challenges with this title too, bugs at first, but now an efficient and often tricky A.I. There have been hurdles yes, but as the game keeps growing these are dealt with leading this very long time gamer actually excited to see what is coming next. As it is, the game is very playable and filled with enough content to have you coming back for more…just one more jump. You can research new ship designs, improvements to your current fleet and special abilities.
As a fleet-based RTT (more so than an RTS) I haven’t found anything quite like it and for the asking price…..do yourself a favour and just buy it. You will not be disappointed.

Right now the game is unfinished and not really stable. But the idea behind is good. I like the graphics. It needs work on how to give ships special orders and the resources you get in a mission are not enough. It is far from finished but if the devs fix all the problems it could be quite a good game Thats why i recommend it.

ok as it stands i would say wait untill the game has had more developement progress before buying it i was looking for a fleet battle capital ship game and this certainly ticks all thoseboxes .. im not going to say anything negative about this game except that as it stands the buttons dont work when you press them you get no briefing or mission goals as to what you are supposed to be doing ..but i guess at this is a Very early access game its to be expected ...
once again wait untill its a little more polished before buying

This game does not feel finished enough to be an early access game. I own many EA games but never any that felt this unfinished. There is literally about 20mins of play before a crash will decide for you that you've done everything that could be done so far in the game. Maybe there is a lot of potential here yes, but I think that it is too far away to warrant purchase of this game.

Even from a company standpoint, was releasing this game so early worth getting negative reviews? You can't tell me that this game is more than a free to play browser game of the sorts at this point. Take "ideas" like this to kickstarter or something until you have a more finished product!.

Maybe in 6 months this game will actually have some content and I will update this review. Until then don't bother wasting your money on a game that only gives 20mins of playtime and may never be fully released.

Game has improved a lot over the last time I played. I enjoyed the new missions and the A.I. was better, the way points help also but could still use some work.

To start positive: I love the concept. As a fan of BSG, and especially the tension of "33", I'm happy this game is here. That said, as things stand, it's very clear it's still in Alpha. Tooltips say things like "We can put text here in a smaller font". Ships have command buttons (like fire turrets/fire missiles) which are duplicated in x & y axis, and yet pushing on either of them does nothing. Which is the basic problem it has as things stand, the only button which obviously does anything is 'jump'. That does jump you to a new sector. But when you get there, there may or may not be friendly ships there. If there are, there's no obvious way to tell (if you hang in battle for a while, you may suddenly read '1611 civilians killed'). The first couple of systems, you're likely to find civilians, take them back home, they unload, then.... there's no running count of how many you have, how many you need. When you jump to a new sector, there's no sense of progression, either that you have to search a certain number, or travel a certain distance (as you're always 1 jump from Home Base). There's no obvious way to tell ships to fire on other ships (whilst you can left click on your ships to get their name/health, and left click enemy ships to see likewise, does left clicking yours then left clicking theres order targetting? Or, rather, is it meant to? As it doesn't appear to.) Rather than the normal convention of middle wheel zooming, middle wheel switches between your ships. Not sure if zooming is possible, or if that's what's meant to happen when you push mouse to top of screen. If you jump to a supply depot, and destroy all the enemy... did destroying the ships get you the supplies the system had? There seems no way to take the fuel & metal on board. I don't know if it was supposed to happen automatically in battle, if a 'get resources' system is to be implemented later, or what.

All in all, after a few hours, I'm rather bemused. The concept is great, the execution is blah, the interface is horrible. Who knows what's going to be changed & fixed as development goes on - I'm not unhappy I bought it to support further development, but I can't imagine I'll be playing it again until there have been a lot of updates.