Outpost 2 is an RTS from 1997, although these days it’s available on GoG.
Despite the title, it’s not a true sequel. It’s a spiritual successor to the original Outpost (1994) but the two games are different genres and mostly linked by “We’ve decided to keep the name of the Earth-killing asteroid, and the fact there WAS an Earth-killing asteroid, but that’s it”. For example, the game Outpost says that Earth and the colony were in contact; the game Outpost 2 makes it clear that Earth was sterilised well before they even left the solar system, never mind set up home elsewhere.
And the story is important. Every thing you finish a campaign mission in Outpost 2, you get a new chapter of the story. I don’t mean “you get a few paragraphs of update”, I mean “you get a new CHAPTER of the scifi novel you are playing out”. The story explains a few of the weirder bits of missions, like “okay my mission objective is to steal their gene bank. What happened to ours?” There are two factions in the game, and each side’s campaign has unique chapters. Initially they are interwoven halves of the same story, but as the game progresses the two narratives diverge. Many of the help files about each type of building in the game also contain a short snippet of story relating to that structure, often starring minor characters from the main story.
(None of the following is spoilers. This is stuff you know after completing the tutorial missions.)
The rough starting point is that after Earth was destroyed, the refugees on the colony ship landed on a Mars-like world they dubbed “New Terra”. They named their new settlement “Eden”. Some decades later, there was a political conflict between the people who wanted to terraform New Terra, and the people who wanted to adapt themselves to it. The latter group split off to found their own settlement, which they named “Plymouth”. This was tacitly accepted, mostly because the more utilitarian leaders realised that it was better not to have all remaining humans in just one basket. At the time of the game, relations were chilly but “you do your thing, we’ll do ours”.
The thing that kicks off the plot is a scientist from Eden being determined to terraform New Terra and wanting to do it so fast that Plymouth won’t have a chance to stop it and will just have to adapt. “An atmosphere in our lifetime” is the rallying cry he very briefly uses. Very briefly because his mechanism is an engineered microbe that cracks oxygen out of the Terran rocks, except he didn’t properly consider the consequences and it turns out that hey, humans have a lot of oxygen bonds . Basically he makes a grey goo. There is a prolonged scene of a horrified elder watching via video link as his apprentice is dissolved . The microbe is quickly dubbed “The Blight” and the surviving residents of Eden get the hell out of there.
Meanwhile it turns out that if you pour enough water into long fossilised tectonic plates, you can reactivate vulcanism. (Outpost 2 is a pretty firm science game; most of the things stopping it being hard scifi are stuff we’ve only learnt in recent years, majority being “no quantum does not work that way”. We’re still iffy on the lubricating tectonic plates.) Plymouth gets wiped out by a newly revived volcano, and is also doing the frantic scramble of evacuating. Both sides realise that they’re going to have to build another starship and get off the planet. And also that there aren’t enough resources for BOTH colonies to stay ahead of the Blight and make their own starships. Cue weapons research and conflict.
Story aside, here are some of the things I like about the game:
- No fog of war! You still have to do a bit of prospecting, but that’s moving between mystery ore deposits you can see and learning how much ore is in them.
- While there is combat, the game does not REVOLVE around conflict. There are no campaign missions where your goal is “build a base, build an army, then go destroy their base”. Honestly, there are no missions where the goal is to destroy their base. There are two missions per side where destroying their base is a likely side effect of stealing their [vital thing], but if you can manage to distract their army and snatch them in a surgical strike, so much the better! But most missions are either base-building missions, where you are trying to build certain resources, or they are vehicle missions where you start with a set amount of vehicles to achieve your goal and cannot replenish them. “Bury your foe under sheer weight of steel” is never an option.
- All the base building missions have a passive timer. At some point the Blight will arrive and you’d better be ready to move. In many others there are volcanos and you will have to deal with lava flowing into your base. The good bit is these will always happen at the same time and place, so if you fail the mission because lava overran your tokamak then you will know to put your tokamak somewhere else. It feels like you can properly LEARN instead of it being random chance.
- Continuity . My gods, I want this in other RTS games. If you unlock a particular piece of research on one campaign mission, you have it available for all future missions . This is one of the reasons “research x” is such a comment goal, because you’re going to start the next mission with the resultant building already constructed. But this DOES mean that on early missions it is often worthwhile to hang back and keep researching more stuff, even if you could win right now; if you get it sooner you’re not going to be so pressed for time on future missions.
- The way combat units are handled. There are three ‘chassis’ of combat vehicle: the light, fast and cheap Lynx, the slow, expensive and heavily armoured Tiger, and the in-between Panther. Then there are the weapons turrets which get mounted on them. All Lynx will share the same speed and hit points, but one might have a railgun and one might have a laser on it, so they’ll do different damage and cost different amounts. This reduces unnecessary complexity but keeps things really flexible. You don’t have to learn fifty million unique unit types, you just mix and match.
- While it does have some side-vs-side conflict, most of the struggle is vs the environment. Turns out a run away Blight thickening the atmosphere means you have WEATHER. Like destructive dry thunderstorms. Or tornados. Or the tectonics getting in on the action and causing volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Step out of campaign mode and much of the challenge of the “free play” games is how you lay out your base to build in redundancies and stop one badly placed meteorite causing cascading failures while you’re still patching up tornado damage.
- The day/night system. The light gradually changes across the map, flowing from left to right. It’s a lot harder to see at night but you can build Light Towers to keep things well lit. Additionally, vehicles have headlights. By default they’re on but you can toggle them off. If the headlights are off they won’t show up on the mini-map at night. The trade off is they’re moving MUCH slower, but you can carefully sneak vehicles into an enemy’s base under the cover of darkness and wreak havoc.
Things that I don’t really like:
- There’s no way to select a particular campaign mission to play on its own. I’ve had to do a heap of save files to skip the vehicle missions that I find tedious.
- I’d like a lot more freeform maps.
- Specifically, some chill ones. Most of the community maps from the GoG version have hardcore conflict or tight time constraints that require few to no errors.
Minor niggles, really. This is a game I keep coming back to every few years.