Galactic battles between hundreds of ships can be presented to a gaming audience in many ways, most of which involve, well, space ships, unloading all kinds of futuristic weaponry through the void towards their target, but unless if you're in an epic EVE Online war, does any galactic battle feel galactic?
And even if you do find yourself in the thick of it in EVE, your computer may struggle to render the view at all. You didn't ask for a photo of a galactic battle, you want to experience one. Ships from multiple planets being flung at a target in, hopefully, overwhelming numbers, but in a readable way.
Enter the cold hard stats and triangular representation of ships in Galcon, a rapid-fire RTS that will not hesitate to fight back.
Fun Times
The core of Galcon is the efficient use of your ideally growing empire. A game begins with you in possession of a single planet, your opponent on the other side of the map with a world of their own.
Each planet generates ships, the majority of which are neutral, ready for the taking. The higher the value of a planet, the more it'll pack a punch when you take it for yourself, and you do so by sending enough ships to it to switch it over to your side.
Frustrations
Unfortunately for you, your opponent very much wants to do the same thing, and will gladly send entire fleets of ships straight to your home planet if it feels it's vulnerable for the taking - which it will be. Each time you send a fleet of ships out into space, you're reducing the value of the planet they came from, making it easier for an opponent to capture it.
Send out ships from the wrong planet and the wrong time, and you're screwed.
To help you in your quest for domination, the mouse scroll wheel raises or lowers the percentage of ships that are plucked from a planet and sent to the next, allowing you to quickly ramp up production, send them out, then bring it all back down while you re-evaluate what you've just done.
It's a nice concept. Send 50% of your forces that way, 70% of what's left the other, let the planets tick up once more before hopping to the next target, all the while watching the opposition forces for where they're heading.
Eventually, if you've been smarter than your opponent, you can select multiple origin planets to pull ships from, a right-click a target to send them in for the kill.
As simple as it looks, it feels good to get one over the AI. Okay, in this particular example it wasn't the final planet of theirs that I consumed, but it still felt great to get something right.
I say this because I am finding it almost soul-crushingly difficult to get a decent grasp of what's going on here. The AI, even at easier difficulties, will not stop. If you get something wrong, sending too many ships, or directing them to the wrong place, you can kiss the game goodbye.
Even on this map heavily balanced in my favour, I shot myself in both feet as I failed to capture what I needed and failed to defend what I had. A single planet can be a launchpad for an attack from multiple fronts, on multiple fronts, and you have to be aware of them all.
I wasn't, I couldn't be, and I wasn't having a good time with a game that is fundamentally as simple as "send ships to capture planets".
Final Word
I got a trial edition of Galcon, so I've three days to decide whether I want to cough up any money for loads more levels and whatever else it offers, but after my initial experience of its difficulty, I think I know what the outcome will be.
Galcon isn't a bad game. I'm bad at Galcon. My strategy is all wrong, my reactions are awful, and putting the game on the easiest of easy modes just for a chance of winning isn't my idea of fun, but I can see that when you're playing it, it's going to be a bit of a frantic, manic time.
I can't imagine how this played on mobile devices without a scroll wheel, or on the dinky screens of the old school iOS devices. I hope it was easier, I know that much.
As I say, though, there's a trial for the PC port out there, and it'll certainly offer you a decent little game unlike any other. Whether you're up for the task of actually being good at it is something you'll have to find out for yourselves.
Fun Facts
A simplified Galcon was used as the basis for an AI challenge, where competitors needed to code some artificial intelligence capable of winning. I bet even those AIs would beat me.
Galcon, developed by Phil Hassey, first released in 2008.
Version played: PC, 2010.