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You're Imperial Commander Yuri Ganda, it's your sworn duty to expand the reach of the The Eternal Terran Empire to vanquish is foes and to defend it's citizen.

As Commander, your job is lead the Imperial forces into battle, giving the right orders and deploying the correct tactics to ensure yet another glorious victory for Humankind.

But maybe you should question the true intent of your superiors? And who's that weird Cadet who one day appeared out of the blue and told you he'd be traveling with you?

Will you ever find out the truth about the mysterious aliens that once created the means for transportation everybody has been using for uncounted millennia without understand how they even work?

---------------------
This game has been intended as my entry to the "Theme Roulette III" event. It got a bit out of hand, obviously.

TRIGGER WARNING:
This game is about interstellar war. Neither side is particularly squeamish about their methods. Even if there's no graphic display of actual violence, some might find the topic disturbing.

Latest Blog

World Movers finally declared finished

I just released version 1.0.0.

You're finally able to find out why it's called World Movers ;)

Features compared to previous releases:
  • Some of the characters actually show emotions (at least sometimes)
  • You can win the war (or rather both of them)
  • Significantly improved AIs. Ranged units are less likely to rush into toe-to-toe fights. Assassins are actually trying to hit their mark and so on.
  • Loads of new levels and crazy things.
  • Background stories ...
  • Credits.


If you ever played before: your old savefiles should be loadable most of the time; if not please do contact me.

By this time and date, let it be known to the universe that the game "World Movers" shall be considered completed!
  • Completed
  • Garage
  • Renpy
  • Strategy
  • 08/29/2020 05:25 PM
  • 04/01/2021 04:59 PM
  • 04/01/2021
  • 7187
  • 0
  • 37

Posts

Pages: 1
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
So! Gave this game a bit of a whirl. Not sure how long I've played, but, my system map includes the jump back to Sol, Bridgehead, Thera, Ether, and a mission in Zerg. Which is probably still very much the early part of the game.

I noticed a number of spelling and grammar errors as I played, but, sadly, I wasn't keeping track of them. As a strategy/tactics game, I half-expected combat to be on the slow side. However, I could feel the game lag in places (ie: the cursor highlight for the hexes sometimes took a bit to update to the mouse's position) when I was trying to move units. I'm not sure if I'm a fan of having a "initiative" stat that determines the order in which units move in a turn, or not being able to see the status of my fleet out-of-combat.

That aside, I can't help but to be impressed by how this could have come together. I don't pretend to know all that much about Renpy, but, the engine is certainly more designed for visual novels. Yet, here is a strategy title made with that very engine. Kinda makes me wonder how much work it took to even get to this point?
Thank you for trying my game, Marrend. As always, any feedback is appreciated.
Like on those spelling errors you mentioned.

author=Marrend
So! Gave this game a bit of a whirl. Not sure how long I've played, but, my system map includes the jump back to Sol, Bridgehead, Thera, Ether, and a mission in Zerg. Which is probably still very much the early part of the game.
That really is quite early in the game.

author=Marrend
I noticed a number of spelling and grammar errors as I played, but, sadly, I wasn't keeping track of them. As a strategy/tactics game, I half-expected combat to be on the slow side. However, I could feel the game lag in places (ie: the cursor highlight for the hexes sometimes took a bit to update to the mouse's position) when I was trying to move units.
Can you be a bit more specific on the situation? What kind of computer are you using (OS, CPU, RAM ... that kinda things), do you have a screenshot or mission for me to check (or better yet a save file) for figuring out what's slowing things down?

author=Marrend
I'm not sure if I'm a fan of having a "initiative" stat that determines the order in which units move in a turn, or not being able to see the status of my fleet out-of-combat.
Yeah. I can relate to that feeling ;) I wanted to try writing this kind of game is all.

author=Marrend
That aside, I can't help but to be impressed by how this could have come together. I don't pretend to know all that much about Renpy, but, the engine is certainly more designed for visual novels. Yet, here is a strategy title made with that very engine. Kinda makes me wonder how much work it took to even get to this point?
Thank you ;)

Ren'py is based on python and is rather generous about allowing to extend itself with the use of "pure" python code.

My games are really "python heavy", especially this one.

The whole strategy and battle stuff is hand coded from scratch by me using plain python.

Only dialogs and displaying screens is more-or-less like you'd expect from a ren'py game.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
author=Garage
author=Marrend
However, I could feel the game lag in places (ie: the cursor highlight for the hexes sometimes took a bit to update to the mouse's position) when I was trying to move units.
Can you be a bit more specific on the situation? What kind of computer are you using (OS, CPU, RAM ... that kinda things), do you have a screenshot or mission for me to check (or better yet a save file) for figuring out what's slowing things down?

I'm not sure if I can be specific on the situation. Mission-wise, I'm pretty sure it happened at least once once per mission that I've attempted. However, if you're asking if it happened when the battlefield was cluttered with units versus a more clean battlefield? It might make more sense to lag if the battlefield was cluttered, and I do find that likely. However, I don't specifically remember how many units there were on the field when I did notice the lag. I might try playing again later today, or tomorrow, to try and notice that. Though, for what it's worth, I think it was the "Football" mini-game that I attempted, and I don't think I noticed a lag there.


As for laptop stats, if it helps to know...


OS: Windows 8.1
CPU: Intel Core i5-5200U, 2.2 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 940M, 2 GB RAM

*Edit: Yes, I emulate PS2 games with this rig. However, I set the power settings to "High Performance" to get them to run nicely/smoothly.


...there ya go.
Thank you. Ok. You're using windows and you have half my RAM size - your CPU is a bit older than mine (on the other hand you do have a dedicated GPU and I don't) ... all in all that shouldn't be that big a difference... I'll have to take a closer look at that highlighting code ... (and maybe wipe the dust from my ol' Windows box and check what happens there).
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
Played a bit more last night with the Zerg scenario. This seems like a really hard one to to pull off. The Mithrans start with three portals, and it feels like they can spawn, like five units from each of them while I can only spawn three units from my portal. The Mithran portals don't spawn units each turn, so I do have something of an early advantage with being able to spawn three units a turn until I run out of ships to spawn. However, since the Mithrans clearly don't run of of ships to spawn, the tide is quickly turned after their third or maybe fourth wave of reinforcements. My last attempt barely saw one of the Mithran portals converting to a low-loyalty portal for the Terran Empire.

As for the lag on this map, I noticed it as early as turn 2, or thereabouts. Which, I think, is about when the Mithrans launch their first wave of defenses. If we're talking about number of units on the field, it would be the four total portals, my initial three ships, and their initial fleet of maybe 10 or so.

*Edit: I think this game could use something akin to the skirmishes of Valkyria Chronicles. As in, a map, or set of maps, that players can do to earn exp and cash. Though, arguably, I'm not really sure what the benefit of EXP is in this game, as ships have this particular tendency to get blown up often. I'm somewhat reminded of the soldiers of yea olde X-Com: UFO Defense on this point.
As for EXP benefit: each unit that has either suffered damage and survived or was able to fire at something gets a reroll for one of it's stats. If you're unlucky this does just nothing because the new roll is worse than the old one.

If you're lucky you improve one of the stats "a bit". ... If you are really lucky that improved stat happens to be speed ...

About ships getting killed off fast and you running out of money ... that depends a lot on how well you play in terms of outsmarting the AI (which, frankly is pretty stupid).

Regarding the training: currently the demo-scenarios have an independent pool of ships you can summon; thus any EXP would not carry over. But you could use "football" for example for trying and figuring out how to maximize your ships survivability ...

Spoilery hints:
Before embarking on "Zerg" you should have finished both "Thera" and "Ether". And you really should try to secure both space stations. That would give you a total of FIVE elite cruisers. (Elite means they have an unique name, usually better stats and are faster than normal cruisers)

You should try to buy as many cruisers before committing to "Zerg" as you can afford. Minimum would be 6 cruisers and 4 fast fighters. Having 9 or better yet 12 cruisers sure won't hurt.

If there's no cruiser for sale try closing and re-opening the shop window, if you're stubborn patient enough you can also do this if you don't like their stats.

General strategy:

1) Take portals in the following order (counting from bottom) 2nd, 1st, 3rd, 4th.

2) Send two waves of cruisers (= 6 in total) straight right to the second portal from the bottom. Send your elites first.

3) If you have, send another wave of cruisers to the next portal above that one.

4) Send 4 fighters, preferably ones with a speed of 4 to the bottom portal, so they can work on that one while your cruisers are still busy.

5) Send in any remaining cruisers or fighters two the upper to portals.

6) Always completely surround a portal you want to take ASAP to prevent enemy from spawning.

7) Always make sure that you have at least taken over the portal before moving on. (Completely securing is always better and might be needed to finish the scenario anyway)

Use the game mechanic for your advantage: play with the "Skip" button whenever units get in each others way. Exploit the range advantage of your cruisers. Lure enemy fighters away from their cruisers. Exploit the fact that cruisers as well as fighters and patrols can't fire more than once per round. Any unit that's marked "RELOADING" can not fight back in that round.

Should I maybe add a difficulty level, like, if you pick "easy" you get higher rewards and might get a chance to retain a destroyed vessel or five?

And if you pick "hard" you'll get lesser rewards and maybe a limit on the number of units of a given type or something like that?

(Making spawn numbers or mission parameters depend on a difficulty level might also be possible but would require significantly more work)
Update: I tried to reproduce the lag you mentioned. And failed. Even on a single CPUed VM running windows 7 with unaccelerated graphics and just 2GB RAM.
(There is how ever a deliberate .3s pause after each step of movement and ships firing at each other also has a few intended delays - maybe one of these might seem like a lag?)

Or maybe I'm just blind for it since I played the game way too much ...
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
No lag when trying to mouse across the hex-grid? Hrm. Well, thanks for looking into it, all the same!
To whom it might concern:

If anybody of you is using a 32bit version of windows you should use the WorldMovers-32.exe - the other .exe is 64bit only.

(The game has been released using the latest version 7.4.4 of ren'py, and they're moving towards "64bit for everyone" ...)
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