Rare to find any RTSs among these gamejams, let alone something as good as this one. It has many of the elements of classic RTSs like balancing playing greedy vs safe, there is some micro involved etc.
I noticed the mechanics of the game lead to some morbid strategies - it's a lot faster to evacuate stations close to the evac point so those are best to be evacuated first so they can grow the economy, but that means using the furthest ones as a human shield made of billions of humans.
My PB is 30 days and 23 hours with 31160 million people saved. I have a feeling that the freighters are actually quite bad compared to the transport ships so I might have done a bit better if I hadn't used any but I am happy with my score. This is probably my favourite game of the jam so far and I will probably to make an RTS next jam as well.
Aww thanks primortis! As I was making this I definitely understood why it's rare XD
There's aloooot of moving parts and systems that might overlap, and balancing units on top of all of that. It is quite a bit!
It's cool that you picked up on the morbid strategies part of it. Personally when I play I still feel a tad bad leaving a station behind to reinforce behind it. If I added audio, I'd probably try and use it to tug on the "people are dying" part more.
And 31 (almost) days is pretty good! Very nice :D
Awesome to hear you might do an RTS :O
If you can load unit stats from a csv file, oh my gosh do it. I just have a large array of structs with all the unit data, and copy pasting takes a while.
Also in the game there are actually just two ship types, the players, and the enemies. And they load things like health and speed from the big array.
