Space Tales is a new real-time strategy game from Vietnam-based Saigon Dragon, who worked with Numantian Games to develop the brilliant They Are Billions. In They Are Billions, you scraped together walls and turrets to hold off a world's worth of undead, and prolong the miserable lives of a tiny handful of non-zombified humans at your settlement's core. Space Tales is breezier of demeanour - like the confusingly named 2014 RTS Space Rogue, it takes inspiration from 1940s retro-futurism, with brightly coloured maps and chunky chrome unit design. But there are similarly grim overtones. The game puts you in charge of a Starship Troopers-esque expeditionary force, carving out secure nooks on very-much-inhabited alien planets and flogging them as holiday destinations.
Space Tales has just launched on Kickstarter. Providing Saigon Dragon hit their funding targets, it'll offer a 16-mission campaign with optional side missions, in which you can research army improvements and build up a squad of side-characters.
What do I mean by optional side missions? Well, apparently there are larger, docile alien lifeforms who can be hunted down for bonus resources and so forth. Who are you, exactly? Some guy called Xander - no, not Xander from Buffy, alas, but the son of a celebrated general of the Intergalactic Planetary Expansion organisation, whose goal is "to peacefully populate the galaxy by any means necessary". If that premise sounds a bit dark, know that this is explicitly a "satire of imperialism/colonialism", to quote the Steam page.
In terms of how it stands apart from other real-time strategy games, there's mention of a hub power system, with larger generators linking out to smaller wireless nodes that decide what you can
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