Nerd Mentality

Galactic domination: All in a day's work

Posted August 13th 2009 by Gareth Trinkwon.

The past few weeks I've been dabbling with an old web game that originally peaked my interest a few years ago. It's called Outer Space, and it's a free turn-based / real-time (kinda both) MMO RTS that has you competing with other players for galactic dominance.

The game is basically a glorified star chart displaying the systems and planets under your control. You can build structures on the planets that allow you to increase your empire's productive power in each area, from construction to research to morale and strategic resources such as titanium and uranium. The suitability for each planet's job depends on its environmental hospitality, size (bigger worlds allow more buildings), mineral deposits and proximity to its star. Large mineral-rich worlds are usually ideal as production planets, and allow you to begin building fleets of ships used to colonise and capture new systems. For anything that isn't any good for production I usually use as a research station or scanner to detect nearby threats. Once you've researched to a certain level, you get the chance to branch your faction off into a specific technological direction, each with its own benefits and depenencies. You can remain human (or super-human), become a race of cybernetic organisms (the Borg?) or go into bio-engineering and develop biological technology. Each one has its own exclusive technologies and strategic differences.

Time in the game is handled by turns. Every hour in real time is one turn, so if you order your fleet to travel to system X, and it says it'll take 20 turns for it to get there, that means you'll have to wait 20 hours before that fleet will have arrived. It can make the game painfully slow at the beginning, since you start off limited to a single system and one colony ship, but as you progress and get more systems under your belt, things rapidly start to pick up, especially when you start encountering other players and factions, with whom alliances can be struck, information shared, or war declared on.

Anyway, if you're interested, check it out. I'm currently playing as one of the larger factions on the Daela galaxy, though I don't recommend joining that one right now as you'll most likely be crushed by the well established empires. You're probably best waiting for one of the games in progress to end and restart and join then.

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