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The essence of the game, in one shot.
There will be a time for peace in the galaxy, where life-forms can skip through the fields and read poetry, unworried by the threat of war, but this is not that time. There will be a time for song, time for cakes, time for long afternoon strolls, but this is not that time. There will be time for love, time for joy, time for writing that novel you know you have in you somewhere, but this is still not that time.
This is a time for war. Huge war, galaxy-spanning war, where the cries for mercy from the citizens of captured worlds will reverberate around the bridge of your flagship. A time for honor, for glory, for huge profits for people in the defense industry.

Gratuitous Space Battles is a game about armed conflict taking place beyond any planet's atmosphere without any given reason. It was developed by Positech Games in 2009 and is available for download and purchase at their website.

The game is rather unique among space battle sims in that the player does not actually give any orders during the battle itself; rather, the player can only make ship designs, dictate their starting position within the fleet, and modify each ship's AI before unleashing them on the enemy. After each battle, the player can analyze the results in order to tweak ship designs and fleet deployment before fighting again. Victories bring the player "Honor," which can be used to unlock hulls, components, and even other races.

There are four main races in the game: The Federation (available from the start), the Rebels, the Alliance, and the Empire. Additional factions — the Tribe, the Order, the Swarm, the Nomads, the Outcasts, and the Parasites — are also available through downloadable Expansion Packs. Each of these races has its own hull designs and layouts. There's a little bit of backstory as to why all these races are fighting each other, but you don't have to know any of it to actually play or enjoy the game. If you have seen any sci-fi at all, chances are you know the backstory anyway.

There isn't a direct head-to-head multiplayer; instead, players compete by putting together fleets on their own computer and submitting them as "Challenges" to an online server. Other players can then download these Challenges and attempt to beat them with their own fleets. The server keeps track of both the number of attempts and the names of those who beat the Challenge.

In addition a Campaign expansion pack has been released that allows the player to provide just a bit of context to the gratuitous combat, as they spread across the galaxy, invading planets and building ever-expanding battle fleets. Just the thing for all you megalomanical conquerers!

A sequel was released in 2015, but it was not well-received and quickly abandoned by the developers.


Gratuitous Space Battles provides examples of:

  • 2-D Space: A given considering the top-down perspective. You can even notice that in both the deployment screen and in combat, frigates and cruisers cannot fully overlap one another (under normal circumstances). Fighters seem to be exempt from this, though, as they can fly over other ships and fighters with no problems.
  • Affectionate Parody: The game in a nutshell is taking those alien races you've seen a dozen times before in other sci-fi stories, distilling them down to their basic essence, and making them blast the crap out of each other.
  • The Alliance: An insect hive dedicated to the eradication of all bipedal lifeforms from the galaxy.
  • Ambiguously Human: The Federation is the first race you get to play as, has the standard blue color scheme associated with humanity and, color aside, fits the ISO Standard Human Spaceship design pretty well, and their names in the fighters' radio chatter are among the more mundane-sounding. But they're never explicitly named as humans. No one is, for that matter.
  • Anti-Armor: Beam lasers and Proton Beams are your best friend when you need to slice through heavy cruiser armor. The latter in particular has the highest armor penetration in the game.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Manifested in-game as a number of pilots available, with each individual ship you deploy - be it a cruiser or a fighter - requiring 1 pilot.
  • Armor Is Useless: Generally averted; you want some armor on your cruisers and frigates to stop them from getting mauled by shield-bypassing fighters, and heavier armor on cruisers, when combined with repair systems, can allow them to shrug off a truly gratuitous amount of fire from almost anything. One may still want to skimp on armor for fighters, however, as even basic ablative armor will add up when the upgrade is being spread across an entire squadron of fighters, and any heavier armor will result in a speed loss and decrease the fighters' survivability. This is especially important in the campaign. That being said, if you can slap armor on your fighters while keeping them above a certain speed, the armored fighters do have a better matchup against unarmored ones (since the armor makes it harder to disable their weaponry and sponges a few extra hits), which can be a deciding factor in fighter-heavy scenarios and challenges.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • Ships and fighters generally target the closest enemy ship unless given specific orders otherwise. This has resulted in the use of "tank cruiser" strategies where one of more cruisers are positioned ahead of the fleet, using massive amounts of armor, shields, and repair systems to soak up fire while allowing the rest of the fleet to fire around it. This can be particularly devastating against fighter-oriented fleets, as the entire fighter force will try to swam the shielding ship and get ripped apart by the rest of the fleet. Any fleet not specifically oriented toward destroying the "tank cruisers" quickly will be torn apart.
    • As for the "specific orders" part, ships can be ordered to prioritize certain types of ships and attack them from a certain range. However, no matter how low you set the priority for attacking a certain kind of ship, as long as you have that order on a ship, they will go after it if there's nothing else in range at the moment. This means that a cruiser with 1% priority on "Attack Fighter" and 100% priority on "Attack Cruiser" will, when given a choice between a fighter squadron in range and a cruiser far away, opt to chase the fighters until it wanders within range of the enemy cruiser. They will also follow the "from a certain range" part to the letter, stopping at that range to engage the enemy even if their weaponry's range is longer or shorter than that. This is the primary reason why using the default orders for any given ship is very seldom a good idea.
    • Ships are not smart enough to understand what weapons are useful against what kinds of enemies, meaning that cruisers can and often will waste copious amounts of missile/laser fire on enemy fighters despite having no real chance of hitting them.
  • Atomic Hate: The Order's faction-exclusive weapons are nuclear missiles and radiation cannons that fire blobs of radioactive material. These irradiate enemy ships that they hit, dealing damage over time at the cost of having low impact damage.
  • The Battlestar: Any cruiser outfitted with carrier modules.
  • Beam Spam: Cruiser Lasers, frigate weaponry like the Ion Cannon and Phaser Cannon, and just deploying lots of laser-equipped fighters all have this effect: bringing down enemies with lots and lots of Slow Laser fire. The Nomads also boast a race-exclusive beam laser that fires volleys of beams at a time. Equip lots of them (and some regular beam lasers) to your fleet, and watch as the battlefield gets sparkly very quickly.
  • Berserk Button: Do not refer to the Swarm as "the Flock". Really, don't.
  • Big Eater: From what can be gleaned from the game itself, the Parasites really love to eat, and their entire reason for fighting is to find a tastier host species. All of their victory quotes involve food, and even their randomly-generated ship names all have something to do with food.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • One of the most potent weapons in the game is the humble but efficient cruiser laser turret. Few weapons in the game can match its damage output, ability to penetrate shields and armor (by Death of a Thousand Cuts), and especially its fire rate. Its only weakness is slow tracking speed (making it poor against fighters and fast frigates) and having one of the shortest ranges in the game. Its not a huge glowey death beam and doesn't have the impressive visual smack-boom of a detonating plasma torpedo, and you're not going to see a hojillion glowing contrails of outgoing missiles, but nothing tears apart cruisers and frigates more efficiently. Of course, you get enough cruisers pouring on the laser bolts, and you do get another breed of visual awesome....
    • Carrier modules. Not particularly flashy, but if you field fighters in any capacity, they'll dramatically increase both the lifespan and viability of your fighter squadrons. Especially useful in the campaign, as destroyed fighters cost money to replace, while carrier modules will greatly reduce fighter casualties.
    • Armor plating. No shiny shields surrounding your warship, but the armor will deflect most fighter-mounted and other low-powered weapons and can save a cruiser that would be otherwise gutted by heavy weapons. However, armor is heavy and expensive, so equipping too much of it can reduce your fleet's efficiency and leave them vulnerable to being gutted by beam lasers.
    • EMP weapons. They inflict no damage at all to the target ship, but they disable all weapons (and most other systems like repair and shield recharge) while the EMP effect is active. As a result, EMP launchers on frigates and EMP cannons on cruisers can be a surprisingly effective force multiplier, especially used en-masse. As a bonus, EMP cannons can be mounted on any slot on a cruiser, even slots normally reserved for non-weapon components.
    • Out of the five or so weapons available to your fighters, the one you'll likely be using most often is the humble fighter laser for being useful against nearly everything. It's one of the best things in the game for taking on enemy fighters, it can attack cruisers and some frigates by being short-ranged enough to hit them from inside their shields, and it compensates for its low armor penetration by shooting a lot and racking up lots of lucky hits on the way. The game puts it best: "It's a clichéd weapon purely because it's so effective."
  • Bottomless Magazines: Cruiser and frigate missile and rocket launchers and Tribe autoguns never run out of ammunition. Fighters, however, can run out of rockets or torpedoes, and need to go back to carriers to re-arm, but they carry a truly gratuitous amount of missiles and rockets regardless. Also, carrier modules eventually run out of spare parts/ammunition to repair/rearm fighters, and repair modules eventually run out of spare parts to repair damaged modules.
  • Church Militant: The Order, from the second expansion pack.
    "This galaxy was created in a weekend by the one true god, and he has no room in it for the likes of heathen aliens such as you. If your species is not listed in the holy book of the one true god, then it's pretty clear you are a mistake, and the order is here to rectify mistakes. For is it not written (depending on translations) that the total destruction of all alien species with devastating radioactive cannons and nuclear space-missiles is the will of the one true god?"
  • Color-Coded Armies: The game has an option to tint allied ships green and enemy ships red, which is very helpful when you're fighting against your own faction. Additionally, allied ships are marked white on the minimap while enemies are blue.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each faction has a design/color combination to make them highly distinctive, save the Alliance and Nomads, who lack a uniform color scheme but still follow a distinct design pattern. Factions also have color-coded shields.
    • The Federation has blue ships that look like throwbacks to classic 50's sci-fi spaceships, though with a strong Star Trek element harking back to their namesake.
    • The Rebels have arrow-like, boxy gunmetal-gray ships, also somewhat reminiscent of their namesake.
    • The Empire features jet-black wheel-like ships that look like evil versions of Deep Space Nine.
    • The Tribe's ships are green and gray, with rounded and organic-looking hulls.
    • The Order features bright red-painted ships that seem to be held together by some kind of weird energy/tractor beams that seem impractical but looks totally freaking awesome.
    • The Swarm's ships look like birds of prey and are painted a bright golden color, with inexplicably car-like fighters.
    • The Parasites go for a very white and shiny scheme.
    • Alliance ships consist of tan-grayish latticeworks around multicolored pods and spheres that make up the core of the ship and give them bug-like appearances.
    • Despite their many colors, Nomad ships are unified by their Raygun Gothic design style.
    • Outcast ships have a generally spherical or circular design with metallic coloration and glowing multicolored bits.
  • Command & Conquer Economy: In the campaign, you're the only one that orders what ships to be built. Also, you're not able to build structures on planet; the manual explains that this is because of all those droid work unions, misplaced and nonstandard parts, zoning issues, etc.
  • Construct Additional Pylons: Averted in the campaign. You need various planetary facilities to do things in the campaign, but you cannot build anymore. There are four structures - shipyards, repair yards, naval academies, and factories, and they come in different sizes.
  • Converging-Stream Weapon: The Disruptor Beam, a beam weapon specific to the Swarm, first fires multiple lasers into a point to gather together into one beam, much like a certain iconic space station. The Swarm's cruisers all have at least one multi-turret hardpoint (that is, a hardpoint whose equipped weapon module is drawn as multiple turrets on the hull; this effect is purely aesthetic and does not multiply the module's firepower) to facilitate this visual effect; you can also equip Disruptor Beams on hardpoints that don't have this gimmick, but that's not quite as cool since it'll just fire a single beam.
  • Cool Starship: So very many of them, and customizable to your heart's content no less. You're bound to be in awe of at least one faction's ship designs.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Many ships loadouts' can leave them this way; missile boats can be very vulnerable to fighters and plasma ships can be easily picked off by fast frigates and fighters; meanwhile, a cruiser or frigate outfitted with certain beam weapons will be helpless against cruisers that buff up their armor or shields, and fighters that lack armor penetrating weapons will not be able to damage heavy cruisers very well - but if they are equipped with armor-piercing weapons, they're hard-pressed to fight enemy fighters. The balancing act between fleets is very delicate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Challenge mode, where many players assemble near-invincible fleets that are nonetheless vulnerable to a particular fleet configuration.
    • Particularly - and annoyingly - common is the challenge that consists entirely of blocks of cruisers equipped with missiles/plasma, defense lasers to stop fighters, and strong shields. The natural response is high-speed cruisers with plenty of guidance scramblers; the Swarm even have a module, the Smart Bomb Pulse Generator, that destroys all missiles in its radius, specifically to render missile-block fleets irrelevant.
  • Damage Is Fire: Damaged or destroyed modules on a ship will be presented as being glowing, burning pits in the hull of the ship in question. Realistically, the flames aren't very intense, and instead glow with radiated heat. Damage to ship hulls is also depicted as fire, though it's not always proportional to the actual damage inflicted.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts: Even ships with gratuitously heavy armor can be brought down by weapons with little or no armor penetration thanks to the "Lucky Hit" mechanic combined with a very high volume of fire. Repair systems can mitigate this, though, provided the armored tank ship doesn't get too unlucky, and provided the repair module doesn't run out of supplies.
  • Defeat Equals Explosion: Starships blowing up is obviously part of the appeal, though this actually serves a practical purpose: exploding frigates and cruisers actually deal damage to nearby ships proportional to the exploding ship's power output. Fighters are neither affected by the blast waves nor do they deal damage when blown up, and frigates take half damage from explosion shock waves. Some Game Mods take advantage of this mechanic by making powerplant modules with ludicrously high power generation to make ships into flying bombs, which also consume most of the power they generate to keep them balanced as powerplants.
  • Deflector Shields: Capable of absorbing an awful lot of damage, are completely immune to weapons with a lower shield penetration than their resistance value (unlike armor), and recharge relatively quickly while they're up, but once they're down, they're gone for good for the rest of the battle. Also, fighters can easily get inside them and bypass their defense, and they can be destabilized by certain special weapons and go temporarily offline.
  • Design-It-Yourself Equipment: You get to design the loadouts of every ship type you deploy. Part of the game's challenge is finding the right loadouts to make a formidable fleet.
  • Diminishing Returns for Balance: Certain modules, like armor, shields, and engines, have diminishing effectiveness if you equip multiple of them on a single ship, putting a limit on the amount of them you can easily use. Armor also doubles down on this by having diminishing resistance based on the number of modules you have on your ship, so if you want armor that reflects most weapons, you will inevitably have to cut down on everything else.
  • Easy Logistics: Generally played straight, especially in the campaign, but certain missions, challenges, and campaign planets have "supply limits" which reduce the number of modules that can be brought to that battlefield.
  • Egocentrically Religious: The Order operates on the basis that their one true god created all of existence for them alone, and that the bounty of the universe is theirs to reap. But when they encountered other species, they found that their texts mentioned nothing about their god creating races other than them, so the Order came to the conclusion that they were created as target practice. Whether it's a case of them being nutcases following a religion that could otherwise be decent, or whether it was a Scary Amoral Religion from the start, isn't made entirely clear.
  • EMP: Available in two flavors: beam cannons mounted on cruisers, and missile launchers mounted on frigates. EMP weapons do no damage, but instead can disable the target's weapons and certain other subsystems.
  • The Empire: Ancient, oppressive, and ruled by a thousand-year old Emperor who is officially "under the weather." Why does that sound so familiar?
  • Enemy Chatter: Inverted. You don't hear anything from your enemies, but you receive plenty of feedback from your own ships.
    That last impact vaporized the ship's galley. Looks like it's take-out food tonight, guys.
  • Enemy Exchange Program: In the campaign, any enemy vessels left over when you win a battle will switch over to your side. You can't build any more of them, but they make for good garrison/militia units.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Excuse Plot to get to the main event of watching a bunch of awesome and heavily-armed spaceships Pew Pew at each other to create chunks of sparking, floating space debris. Then you buy more stuff and do it again.
  • Excuse Plot: It's called Gratuitous Space Battles for a reason.
  • Explosions in Space: Played a bit more realistically with a bright flash followed by a cloud of smoke and debris, though any wrecks or debris resulting from the explosion will be moving very slowly regardless of how fast the ship was going when it exploded. The explosion is also stationary where the ship blew up.
  • Face Full Of Alien Wingwong: The Parasites.
  • Fantastic Racism: Everyone toward everyone else. Special mention goes to the Alliance, who hate anyone with less than six legs and an endoskeleton. The Outcasts actually got their name after a thousand years of violent conflict between the cybernetic half of their species and the baseline organic half. It only ended when the cybernetic half nuked the rest from orbit and then set out to rid the galaxy of other baseline organic life.
    • About the sole exceptions are the Nomads, who don't hate everyone else, they're just (literally) killing time until they finally find a planet they'd like to settle down on, and the Federation, who shoot people that owe them money and/or because they're paid/sponsored to.
  • The Federation: An association of galactic merchants dedicated to making money. They technically don't have a real navy; all their warships are actually part of their "Contract Enforcement Division." And everyone has a contract that is due.
  • Fragile Speedster: The Swarm have a faction-wide 15% speed boost, but have 5% penalties to shields, armor and hull integrity, making their ships this. Finally, many frigates and all fighters are like this in general, being fast but frail; fighters generally use their speed as their defense method though, while frigates... don't. That being said, it is absolutely still possible to design frigates fast enough that cruiser weapons can't easily hit them without tractor beams.
  • Game Mod: For a small game, the mods can be very numerous, however, many of them are permanently lost when the game forum posts that host the download links were taken down (the direct download still works though; that's how some forum-specific mods are saved).
    • The Classic Dreadnaughts Mod adds a Dreadnaught Class to the four vanilla core factions (actually just three; The Rebels' Dreadnaught is more of a super-heavy cruiser), including a new generator and engine type for dreadnaughts.
    • Mod DB has a ton of these, simply go to Mod DB's GDB Page and you can find many fanmade factions, mostly with original ship design and some new modules. Suggestions include Uni-T, Praetorian Industries, The Ghosts and etc. If you play as any three of these, you may encounter not just more powerful weapons, but you will also have access to even more exotic ship types like dreadnaughts, "corvette fighters", space turret emplacements, and even gigantic space stations.
    • Not to mention there is the addition of Star Wars, Babylon 5 and Mass Effect ships too (the Star Trek one is unfortunately lost forever).
    • The latest faction mod, Deadblot's Trifecta, adds three factions with each of them having a capital ship that takes CDM up to eleven by making them so large that it only can be used in some larger maps, as well as including a few powerful weapons that have damage level of three to four digits.
  • Glass Cannon: Most frigates can be this way; even their most powerful shields can be swatted down fast by most cruisers, and they get absolutely torn apart by fighter swarms. On the other hand, they can do a ton of damage at low cost, they move fast for their size, and only frigates can mount ion cannons, EMP rockets, disruptor bombs, and anti-fighter missiles. Outcast frigates deserve special mention on this front, as they have a number of race-exclusive modules allowing them to tear enemies to pieces from well outside most other weapons' effective range or shut down enemy fighters in droves, but are still about as durable as a normal frigate (in other words, not very).
    • Many races have a Cruiser hull specialized to this end, such as the Federation's Panther or the Tribe's Utopia. They will feature a higher number of weapon hardpoints in exchange for much fewer subsystems, which will be almost entirely focused on meeting the huge power and crew demands for their vast weapon arrays. Downplayed in that hardpoints can also be used to mount non-weapon subsystems, allowing you to use them for things other than gratuitous amounts of weaponry.
    • The Swarm. While their ships have less survivability than other factions, having cheaper hulls means they can field more ships - and, by extension, put more weaponry on the board.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: The Parasites have a guidance scrambler that actually turns missiles back around at the ship that fired them.
  • Hologram: One of the Outcasts' race-exclusive modules projects a hologram of the host ship to divert enemy fire away from the original.
  • Hopeless War: For just about everyone. The Rebels are locked in a permanent struggle with the Empire for freedom, and with everyone else for simple survival. The Empire is bent on conquering the galaxy, the Alliance and the Order are on genocidal rampages to wipe out everyone else, the Swarm are just doing what they've been doing for eons since, and the Tribe are killing everyone because they've realized the only way the galaxy will be at peace is if everyone else is dead, the Parasites need new hosts, the Outcasts have a boiling hatred for organic life, and the Nomads are killing everyone because, well, they're bored. And everyone owes the Federation money, and they're coming to collect.
  • The Horde: The Swarm are a nomadic species of birdlike creatures who have apparently spent countless eons roaming the galaxy, doing nothing but conquering civilizations and destroying everything in their wake. And there are a lot of them.
  • Jack of All Stats: The Federation is a middle-ground faction with small bonuses to many stats (often hull integrity) and no penalties. This makes them a good all-around faction to start off with, and flexible enough to run with many strategies and configurations.
  • Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: The Tribe has access to close range autocannons, which deal low damage but come with blistering fire rates.
  • Lightning Gun: The Alliance have a weapon specific to their faction that fires a huge bolt of electricity. Extremely short-ranged, but great at shorting out the enemy's shields.
  • Luck-Based Mission: The campaign's battles involve the player being sent up against fleets randomly selected from those being used by other players who've played the campaign. As a result, the player will sometimes end up fighting poorly designed fleets that fall apart like tissue paper. Other times, they'll end up slamming headlong into an immaculately-designed, highly-efficient fleet of death. Ultimately, the only way to win is to make sure your fleets are just as well-designed.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Because point-defense systems and guidance scramblers exist to stop missiles, the generally accepted response is "more missiles". As they tear through shields and have the longest range of any weapon in the game, it often takes a specially designed fleet to take down a fleet armed to the teeth with missile launchers (particularly Multi-Warhead Missiles, which have even longer range than most other missile variants and shoot multiple projectiles at a time).
  • Martial Pacifist: The Tribe really, honestly would like the universe to be at peace and have no one be harshing anyone else's mellow, it's just that they've come to the conclusion peace can only be achieved by killing the living daylights out of everyone else.
  • Mighty Glacier:
    • The Empire specializes in this; their ships aren't generally built for speed and are expensive to fully kit out, but they boast lots of subsystems and bonuses to shields (aside from their fighters, which are cheap, throwaway Cannon Fodder). They even get a special frigate hull named the "Weapons Platform" that has minimal modules but eight hardpoints (by comparison, that's more than many cruisers get), and is designed to either have little to no engine capability....but with the sheer number of hardpoints and low cost, the platform is able to inflict a ridiculous amount of damage-per-cost.
    • The Order's ships move very slowly, generally having a substantial speed penalty, but their power generation is such that they can afford to stack tons of weaponry on their cruisers.
    • The Classic Dreadnoughts Game Mod takes this to its logical end, with truly titanic and slow-moving battleships twice the size of most cruisers and mounting even more weaponry.
  • More Dakka: Ships can mount rapid-fire weapons, including cruiser lasers and quicker-firing plasma weapons. Special mention to the Tribe's autocannons, which are designed to spray enemies with lead at point-blank range. Frigates can load up on rapid-fire ion cannons or phasers to chew up shields. Fighters can mount faster-firing pulse lasers, and there's a mod to add a "fighter gatling gun" that amplifies the fighter fire rate to insane degrees.
  • Old-School Dogfight: Fighters engaging in combat will usually engage in classic whirling-around-in-circles while doing strafing runs, unless they've been specifically given the "Follow Leader" order, which causes them to launch concentrated strafing runs against enemy vessels.
  • One Nation Under Copyright: The Federation. It lampshades this rather humorously in one of the losing quotes, telling you that even though you lost the battle, you managed to fight so impressively that your sponsors are going to make a handsome profit from the public broadcast syndication rights.
  • Plasma Cannon: A weapon available to cruisers and frigates, firing long-ranged blobs of plasma. While they're not as good at hitting targets or as long-ranged as missiles nor as good at armor-busting as lasers, they're decent at melting through shields and armor alike and are the longest-ranged cruiser weapons that ignore point defense.
  • Point Defenseless: Averted. Properly used, point defense systems can chew up an entire Macross Missile Massacre, and specially-designed short-range lasers can tear enemy bombers to pieces. Ships that are not equipped with point defense weapons, however, will be helpless against fighters unless tractor beams can slow them down.
  • Programming Game: You set up your fleet and can give general behaviours to your ships but don't direct them in battle.
    • One of the last patches for the game included a Direct Control mode, which allows you to alter orders mid-fight, at the cost of disqualifying you from adding your name to the list of those who have cleared a challenge.
  • Private Military Contractors: The Federation's fleet is made up of mercenaries who enforce the merchant association's contracts, and individual ship captains are billed for ammunition and paid by the kill.
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy: Everyone. Even the Federation's mercenary troops are extensively trained, highly-motivated, and willing to give their lives for their contracts.
  • Recursive Ammo: When missiles approach their target, several decoy projectiles will split off from the main missile to throw off enemy point-defense. The Multi-Warhead Missile, as its name suggests, is unique in that the missile splits into multiple damaging projectiles and a decoy or two.
  • Regenerating Shields, Static Health: Shields regenerate over time even in combat as long as they aren't knocked out completely, while hull integrity and damaged armor can't be restored except through a repair module.
  • La Résistance: The Rebels, a group of breakaway races whose members didn't want to spend the rest of their life fighting for the Empire. Therefore, they've devoted their lives to fighting against it instead. It comes as no surprise that most member species are described as "irony-resistant".
    Excellent. By blasting our enemies into atomic ribbons, we have truly proven to them that we shall not engage in their bloodthirsty wars.
  • Roboteching: Downplayed as missiles that get dodged don't usually turn well enough to hit sufficiently fast targets. Played straight by Anti-Fighter Missiles mounted on frigates which, as their name suggest, are built for taking on the fast and agile fighters and as such can take much sharper turns than most missiles.
  • Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Pretty much everybody. Special mention goes to the Order for being pitch-perfect homicidal alien fundamentalists, the Empire for being textbook alien conquerors, and the Alliance and Outcasts for being driven by Fantastic Racism against non-insectoids and organic beings respectively. Even the Rebels have a bit of a communistic bent to them, particularly in their end-of-battle quotes.
  • Scenery Porn: The backgrounds in this game are jaw-droppingly beautiful - and that's before rivers of high energy death start spewing back and forth and chunks of ships go flying artfully through space amidst huge explosions.
  • Space Fighter: A strong fighter fleet can be a game-winner. Each fighter only has handful of slots and a tiny powerplant, often having to do without shields or armour. However, you can have lots of them, and they can easily be made too fast for most non-fighter ships to actually hit; even mighty battleships can be worn down by a ravening horde of fighters, especially if they decided to skimp on armor.
    • Fighters are especially useful early on in the campaign, where you won't have a the capacity to produce lots of cruisers.
  • Spiritual Successor: Gratuitous Tank Battles, which is a tower-defense game in alternate-history post-World War I...with mechas. And of course, tanks.
  • Standard Human Spaceship: Though no species is explicitly human, the Rebels and Federation both delve into this. The Rebels go for boxy, gunmetal grey ships, while the Federation paints theirs blue and has a more Star Trek, retro feel.
  • Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Comes with the territory. All vessels are broken down into three main categories (Fighters, Frigates, Cruisers) by hull type. Where they fit further on in the scale depends on how the player designs and uses them.
  • Standard Sci Fi Setting: What backstory does exist for the game is kept as generic as possible.
  • Stealth in Space: With no explanation given or needed. A module allows your cruisers to cloak and hide, though they can't fire their weapons while stealthed.
  • Stone Wall:
    • The standard MO of the Tribe, who have a race wide penalty to shields and armor but double the hull points of other races and a race-exclusive repair module that works better than everyone else's. Tribe ships will spend more or less the whole battle with flames pouring out of them, but rarely actually detonating.
    • The Alliance's ships all have bonuses to armor and few hardpoints (barring the Python), making them great at soaking damage but slower to dish it out. It's very possible to build an Alliance fleet with enough armor on each ship to shrug off most weapons that aren't beam lasers.
    • Most races have a cruiser hull tailored to this end, with very few weapons but a surfeit of subsystems. If you're willing to forgo anything but a few token weapons, these ships can soak up fire from an entire fleet without breaking stride. Of particular note is the Empire Praetorian, which has only 5 weapon slots but 15 subsystems, the highest number in the game.
  • Subsystem Damage: A ship's hull integrity is composed of the collective HP of its modules, and as a result modules can be damaged and destroyed individually, directly reducing a ship's performance in battle as it takes damage. It's not at all uncommon to see ships (particularly frigates and fighters due to their modules having less health) turning away and fleeing the battle because all of their weapons got destroyed by enemy fire, even though the ship's hull is otherwise mostly intact.
  • Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: A fairly complex one, as nearly every combination of weapons/ships/modules has a counter. Missile-heavy fleet? Slap on some guidance scramblers, point-defense, or a bunch of fighters. Frigate-heavy fleet that's using cruisers as screens? Gratuitously-fast rocket fighters are your friends. Having trouble closing with that plasma/beam fleet before they rip your ships to shreds? Time to load up on EMPs. Enemy using an annoying amount of EMPs on you? That's why they made EMP shields. Coming up with the right balance of firepower, ship types, and defenses to beat your opponent's fleet is at the core of this game's challenge.
    • As a general rule: missiles beat shields, beams beat armor and blasters beat hull.
  • Theme Naming: Each faction has ships named after a particular theme. The Federation's ships are named after terrestrial animals, the Alliance's fleet is named after aquatic and reptilian predators (with their fighters named after arthropods), The Empire's ships are named after Ancient Roman military terminology, and the Rebels' ships are named after Norse and Greek mythology. The Tribe draws their names from terms regarding tranquility and transcendence, the Order has names drawn from the Catholic church, and the Swarm is based on ancient Egyptian mythology. Nomad ships have names that sound vaguely Arabic, the Parasites take names from taxonomic classifications, and Outcast ships are named after metallic elements.
  • Tractor Beam: Frigates and Battleships can be mounted with (blue) Tractor Beams, slowing the pesky-deadly fighters down to the point where slow tracking beams and missiles can kill them. The Outcasts have a multi-targeted version for their frigates to trap multiple fighters at a time.
  • War for Fun and Profit: The former is the entire causus belli of the Nomads, who think genocide is a great way to kill an afternoon, while the Federation eats, sleeps and breathes the latter.
  • Weather of War: "Spatial anomalies" which cause a variety of effects on the battlefield that limit the number of ships that can be deployed, or which have other effects such as reducing shield strength or weapons ranges or requiring engines to reach the battlefield.
  • We Have Reserves: They call the Swarm, well, the Swarm for a reason; their hulls are generally cheaper so the Swarm can put more ships on the field. Their defeat quotes also edge toward this, pointing out that even if they are defeated, the destroyed fleet is just one of many endless waves.
    • Frigates and fighters in general. Fighters are fragile but individually quite cheap so they can be easily replaced. Frigates, though, will be destroyed in droves, in any gameplay mode.
  • You Have Failed Me: Some defeat quotes have shades of this toward the player. The Rebels and Empire, curiously, tend to have this in common.
    Rebels: The rebel creed is to reward success rather than punish failure. We will leave that to you. Here is a laser pistol with one charge. Don't make it too messy.
    Empire: Disaster, we are defeated and the name of the emperor is besmirched. This is a disaster. Also, you will be executed immediately.
  • You Require More Vespene Gas: Three resources are required in the campaign: cash, produced by Factories, crewmen, and pilots, both of which are produced by Naval Academies. Crewmen are required to man the bigger ships, while pilots are required to fly all ships, regardless of size. Fighter squadrons require large numbers of pilots, while frigates and cruisers only require individual pilots.
  • Zerg Rush: see We Have Reserves above.
    • Can be done with the other factions as well; frigate spamming is a fairly effective tactic (unless the enemy has rocket-fighters....) Frigate spam is especially useful in the campaign, as a squadron of fighters costs about twice as much as a single frigate; early on your fleets will likely consist of a lot of frigates because you don't have the income to build a cruiser every turn.
    • Less effective in the campaign, since you have to spend money, crew, and pilots to replace lost warships and fighters. You can't just toss aside ships like you can in regular battles. The Swarm still gets an edge, though, because their cheaper ship hulls translate into a big economic advantage in the long run, allowing them to zerg more effectively...

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