An officer assigned to the hull might repair it slowly over time, while another will place shields that absorb incoming damage.Įach officer also has various skills that can be used during events to unlock extra dialogue options or to avert danger during planetary expeditions. Each officer has a variety of abilities that only apply when the officers are assigned to a specific system, such as the hull, weapons or squadron. The influence of "FTL" is strong in how the admiral's battleship is upgraded.Ī ship also needs officers, and crew members with various abilities can be hired and unlocked.
The ship must have fuel to travel and scrap to upgrade systems and spend at various outposts encountered. On-board weapons can perform various functions, from directly damaging the enemy battleship or disabling its weapons systems, to healing your squadrons or even launching tactical nukes onto the battlefield.Ĭombat is pretty forgiving at first, and the difficulty scales up throughout each chapter.Īlong with battles, resource management is key.
Fights between ships take place in a pausable, real-time strategy (RTS) battlefield, where battleships duel using both onboard weapons (that charge up slowly between shots) and a hexagon grid where ship squadrons skirmish.īattles are quite tactical, with each squadron having a rock-paper-scissors type of strength/vulnerability. While the fact that there's a story is the biggest upgrade over "FTL," combat has seen a major improvement, too. The game unfolds over five chapters, and each chapter comprises three sectors, with boss fights at the end of each sector. Gameplay takes place in sectors, which must be crossed to the exit at the far side. Each encounter adds to or subtracts from ship resources some encounters can be played smartly, but others are 50-50 coin flips.
While the storyline is linear, every play-through of "Crying Suns" promises a unique experience, as Idaho's ship must traverse sectors filled with randomly generated solar systems and events. The OMNIs, god-like machines that did everything for their human masters for hundreds of years, mysteriously shut down 20 years ago, and humanity is nearing extinction.Īdmiral Idaho must pilot a battleship across a fallen galaxy to find out what happened, both to the galaxy and to himself. Players control the clone of a once-famous intergalactic admiral, Ellys Idaho, who is awakened in a very "Matrix"-like people-farm in a far corner of the universe.