Hell is such an underused setting. It has the power to drive twisted imagery straight to the forefront of peoples mind, yet is malleable enough to be moulded into whatever a developer can conjure. Vic Davies of Cyptic Comet has tapped the potential by creating Solium Infernum – a Turn Based strategy game based on politicking, warring, devilish trickery, scheming, and ultimately being a dick to your so-called friends.
Primarily a multiplayer game, Solium sees six players in a power battle for reign of hell. Lucifer has left the throne, leaving the remaining government – The Conclave – to decide who should take over. As turns progress players earn prestige with the simple idea that whoever has the most at the end of the game (which spans around forty turns depending on a few variables) is crowned King and therefore Winner. And the hunt for prestige is where Solium turns into a strategy game like none I have known before.
Prestige can be harvested through a few ways, the main being by capturing Places of Power. These are locations on the hex based map for your Legions (armies) to capture. They grant a sum of prestige per turn and often a bonus stat increase or two. These places are desirable for everyone involved and rare in number meaning extremely hostile takeovers are more than inevitable – if you can find an excuse to be hostile anyway.
Hell is full of red tape. The Conclave works like the most uptight victorian goverment you care to imagine. You can’t simply start a war – you have to have cause to start one. Whether that be because someone refuses to meet your demands or because they would rather go to war than take an insult from you in front of the whole government, there has to be a reason. And then you have to set terms to the war – the criteria for when you will be satisfied enough to stop fighting. All of these things – diplomacy or lack of – are made official and have to be processed through the conclave lest you be exiled at which point anyone can do anything against you. It’s a bittersweet system of having to worm around the conclave while simultaneously using them for protection.
And before you start making efforts for war, you have to plot everything. For the early stages of the game you are only able to commit two orders per turn. Moving a legion is an order. Throwing an insult to another player is an order. Buying a new Legion or Praetor (officers which provide stat boosts), gathering resources, casting a ritual, improving your base stats – these all cost an order. You have to be precise, efficient, and know exactly what you want to achieve before you comit to anything.
It’s complicated, OK.
As you can tell, Solium is not a straight forward game by any stretch of the imagination. The accompanying fifty page manual isn’t a nice collectable to be leafed through during installation, but required reading and reference material. Not that this should put you off; the complexity is what drives Solium and what will keep strategies rolling around in your head long after you have exited to think things over. It’s in the devious overthinking that the joy is, and the constant worry of what people are lining up to do to you.
It is undoubtedly an indie game though, and you would be forgiven for reeling at first glance given the $29.99 price tag given the rather ugly look of it. While Solium is brilliantly focused on what it wants to achieve, a little more spit and polish in the visuals department would have gone a long way. Everything is functional, but getting around the menus can be fiddly and the main map screen makes getting the information you want just slightly unpleasant. Even just a bit of shading to outline players territory would have made reading situations ten times easier – but to an extent this is nitpicking and it saved to an extent by some fabulous artwork.
Where the main frustrations lie are with the multiplayers ‘play by email’ functionality. It’s tiresome. Hosting a game means juggling files from everyone involved and while it’s a simple enough process – it’s one that grates as you have to download, import and send files for each turn. Not that I know how it could be made easier (well, actually, just some pop3 and SMTP account settings would mean full automation but now isn’t the time), but technology has moved on from the processes in use here. No one wants to mess around with files buried in directories and emailing – it needs to be taken care of.
In the end, Solium achieves where other strategy offerings fail – it sets everything in a fascinating place and moves on from plain fighting. Grand strategy and deviousness is the key, and Hell is the perfect place for it. When you start to doubt your friends because you think they just might be playing you for an advantage, you have to worry. I’ve had to be careful in writing this piece just in case I gave anything away about the current game I have going on with Ed, Tom and Thom – god forbid they gained any ideas on what I was doing. And that’s what makes it great – as you strategise around Hells politics you know everyone is doing the same, and it’s terrifying.
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Sounds good. It’s unfortunate that Vic Davis wants to only cater to hardcore strategists, because I think that’s a losing move. You cut off a giant base of people who want to get into it, but need a good game to really get them in, and hook them up for life. I know I’m one of them.
It certainly doesn’t help that the tech is not fantastic either. This would be great on a netbook.
The RPS lot did a great little report on it, and I expect you lot to talk about the game you all are playing now. Should be fun. Especially if Craig loses. Guess who ends up getting fired then…
It looks an amazing game, but a very expensive game, in both terms of time and money. Might look into it when I get a load of free time.
We will be talking about our game, we just can’t talk about it now, there’s too much at stake.
Is there backstabbing? There’d better be backstabbing.