Lord of Rigel Tactical Ship Combat Demo

4X strategy games are capable of stealing entire days from gamers, due to the fact that time stops being a factor when you are actively trying to expand your empire. Games like Galactic Civilizations and Sid Meier’s Civilizations are almost just as popular today as they were back then, because few other franchises have managed to reach the same level of quality and replayability since then.

Lord of Rigel Tactical Ship Combat Demo is not actually a game yet, but it part of a larger project that’s currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The final release is going to be called Lord of Rigel, and it aims to be a lot like Masters of Orion, except more modern and packed with features. On the other hand, we can only judge the combat system we can play with at the moment, and not even that’s finished anyway.

As such, this is but a demonstration of the combat system and the ship builder you’ll be using in the game. You can put together a fleet and play against the computer to see which army wins the confrontation, although you also have to configure and design the AI’s ships as well. In this regard, you can choose from a variety of weapon types, as well as a couple of bonus upgrades to have the upper edge.

As far as the actual battles go, the turn-based mechanics are the most obvious choice in this case, especially when players have to deal with many individual ships at the same time. This way, each side gets a chance to move the spaceships and fire their weapons at the desired targets. To make matters simple, the map is split into a grid, and the units can only move a certain distance with each turn.

Visually, it’s way too early to tell how the game is going to turn out, but so far the artwork is great. The in-game graphics are not exceptional as of now, but then again there’s not much to see. Unity was used to design this tech demo, but it would appear that the game has a tendency to freeze every now and again, especially if you happen to toy with the settings.

All things considered, Lord of Rigel has a good chance to turn into something decent, as long as the developers to not forget themselves over the course of the development period. Replayability is the primary concern, otherwise it wouldn’t be a proper 4X game.