Solar Vengeance

Dion Kurczek is devoted.

As a project that first premiered in 1995 as a turn-based strategy game involving only three possible units controlled one at a time by the arrow keys, Kurczek's game Solar Vengeance (now on version 5) has come a long way. Nowadays, players of Solar Vengeance can select six units out of a possible 24 units to pit against opposing players in matches of real-time warfare.

Solar Vengeance is all about strategy and out-guessing your opponent - a game of rock, paper, scissors taken to the extreme. It is ironic that such complex and deep strategic gameplay is comprised of such simple components. Nearly every aspect of the game is simple: from the graphics themselves (retro-sprite pixel-art), to the sounds (no hard-metal beat to run-and-gun to; just beeps, blips and booms). Even the units themselves are overly simplified, stripped to the barest abilities. That is: how fast can this ship go, and how much damage can she take?


For those of you who have played the old board game Stratego, Solar Vengeance should strike a chord of familiarity. It should, because Stratego is the very inspiration behind Kurczek's project. Much like the units of that old game, the many different spaceships found in SV have simple number ratings, and if, say, a WarShip (the main fighting unit of the game) with a weapons rank of 5 goes up against another WarShip with a weapons rank of 4, the ship with w5 will always win (that is, do damage to the enemy ships, while taking none in return). In fact, if a Warship of weapons 5 goes up against ten WarShips of weapons 4, it will still win, because 5 is a larger number than 4. Simple as that. Ties? There are no stinkin' ties! If you attack a ship of equal or higher weapons rating to your own, your ship is the one that's gonna bite the dust.This in itself adds an interesting aspect of strategy to the game, for (unless you are fighting within scanner-range) you never know what units you are encountering, but rather simply whether or not your units are stronger or weaker. Your w3 ship just got destroyed? Well you know that the opposing ship is at least a weapons rank of 4...


However, the game isn't as simple as that (and those of you who have played Stratego should have seen that coming...). WarShips have another rating as well, an "engine" rating, which determines speed. Your one super-weapon of a ship isn't going to protect your StarSytems worth a damn if a bunch of under-powered yet speedy ships go ripping past before it can keep up. And of course, there are other ships besides the WarShip, and for each new ship, there is a counter-ship to fight it with. There are ScanShips for probing the unknown space beyond your StarSystems' scanners, but these simply tell you that there is something out there, not what it is, that is the job of the SpyShip. There are StarTillery units, which do ranged damage, and Drones, which suicide-bomb and whose weapons rank is the rank of its engines. There are EMines that do immediately fatal damage to any enemy ship that wanders too close, and InkSpots, which allow for tracking of ships enemy ships beyond scanner range. Each unit has only one true purpose, and it is up to you to best utilize this to your own end.

Even the arena in which you wage war provides an atmosphere of strategy: Nebulae mask ships from scanners, providing perfect spots to lie in wait, wormholes transport your units across the map instantaneously. Personally, my favorite player on this galactic stage is the black hole, which is undetectable... until it sucks in one of your ships!


Although Solar Vengeance only has a small community of online players at the moment, it is a great one: welcoming of all newcomers and nearly every time I have logged on I have found someone willing to play a multiplayer match. And even if you can't find someone online, there is a single-player skirmish mode as well, which ironically does nothing but boost my admiration of the multiplayer community the game has fostered: all the AI's for the single-player game are coded by the community itself, from the simple-yet-effective, TinyBoss AI to the near-unbeatable brain of Stratego4. In fact, the brain-writing aspect of the game has almost formed its own branch of competition, as the online rankings of the different AIs can be found in addition to the online rankings of the human players. For those who like to dabble in code, the challenge always stands to create the next top brain...

Kurczek is already impressed with the contributions from the community - from AI opponents to scenarios, much of the content of Solar Vengeance is user-created, and the game still offers much in the way of community customization. What will come next? A new unit? A new Skin-set for the ships? A new map to explore? Ultimately, that question will be answered by the small but ever expanding community of the game.

So if you're looking for a challenging space-strategy with a good online community that has plenty of promise, go check out Solar Vengeance. I'll see you there (unless I have my fleet in a nebula, in which case you'll never know what hit you...)

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