Neptunes Pride – The GD War – Part 4

WasteManager:

It’s done. Over. I placed third by a whisker. I’m happy, maybe a little disappointed I didn’t bag second but I survived well enough. I’m also exhausted, really exhausted. It’s so stressful, I think because of the amount of time Neptune plays out over it feels like a total investment into the game. I remember I was out all day at a meeting and I was fretting because I just entered my war with Poseidon. I was on a motorway and worrying about Neptunes Pride.

I think I didn’t win because I never invested enough in science – In the last moments, while I had the most ships, they were totally outclassed. Everyone elses were faster and stronger – I never stood a chance. Overall though, I did ok. Placing third is no mean feat and I pulled of some crazy diplomacy. And next time I see Ironcock I’m going to bludgeon him – I would have places second if he hadn’t started attacking me.

Will I ever play it again? I honestly don’t know. I loved my time with Neptunes, but at the same time it often felt like a mental burden – that constant nagging that something could be happening and then the frustration and disappointment when you log in and realise that you were right, a fleet is 14 hours away from one of your key systems and there is nothing you can do about it. The day that it ended, a weight lifted that’s for sure, though a certain sadness set in to replace it. While the experience is completely stressful, it’s also a constant – something you can log into and have a mini game of; tweaking plans, setting others in motion, firing off an email – and it’s all part of a grander strategy. I’ll miss Neptunes, but I don’t think I want to put myself through it again; it wouldn’t be long until I can justify sending someone a mail-bomb by writing it off as ‘tactics’.

The Space Turtles and Toilet Brushes are in a peaceful galaxy at last. Max Ironcock drew up plans for a peaceful infrastructure, focusing for now on disarmament and War tribunals for Wastemanager, who seems to have dissapeared from the system. Every few years a dishevelled Dante, drunk and wild with rage comes and stabs Ironcock at random events, forgetting each time that Max Ironcock has a shell that renders him un-stabbable.

Robot Mana was found short circuited at his governer’s desk, having apparently been struck with a virus whilst looking up ways to beat Wastemanager. His cybernetic brain wasn’t equipped with safeguards to protect against googling “Tentacle beast”. Ludo forever more looked at the rise and fall of Neshmet’s three suns, whilst Miker was given an insect planet to lay his spider webs around and plot his revenge.

Poseidon came shambling to Max one day, sodden and dejected after having been ousted by the ferverous brusheads for apparently betraying them. He kept mumbling about a “Drusilla” and that this whole galaxy wasn’t real, some cock and bull story of waking up here after hitting his head on a fireplace and now he just wanted to get back. Max took pity on him and said he knew how Poseidon could get back, so gave him a fleet and directions to keep going till he got to Ogygia but en route should try to avoid Cyclopes and Aeaea. Before setting off Max also told him to seek out a being called Orpheus, who might be able to help him with Drusilla. Max then ran out of classical references to describe the journey, so sent Poseidon on his way and went back to running the semi-benign Ironcock dictatorship.

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So, I won. In the end I was able to salvage a bit of my good and kindly nature and ally with Poseidon. As he said at the time, “It feels so nice to finally trust someone”. And you know what? It did. Even in my close alliance with Dante, I never fully trusted him which probably lead to my backstab coming mainly from pre-emptive paranoia.

Fucking psychological warfare. It’s been a draining month emotionally and mentally. Emotionally it was a terrible burden of secrecy and not quite sure what others were planning or saying to one another. Mentally so in the figuring out of journey times, combat results and where to send my contingency fleets plus the optimal investing in my stars. For now, I’m not returning to this game. In the future I think I’ll only return in a premium game that recognises formal alliances, rather than the crazy paranoid alliances that have to fall apart at some point for somebody to at least win.

Towards the end there was generally a sense of tiredness to everybody left in the game, very reminiscent of the end of World War I. I’m not entirely happy with how I won, and though pleased I managed to beat both Dante and Miker the fact I even had to in the first place leaves me cold. Still, I’m victorious and there feels like a terrible burden has been lifted. As the game came to a close I realised it was ridiculous how much I’d gotten involved in this game, and really just had to laugh about it. War is hell, War is tragic but most of all War is just idiotic.Faced with the emotinal weight of having just been a massive bastard, I can’t think of any better way to end my Space Presidentship. The Turtle Moved, and now retires.

To that end, I leave you with the Space Turtle Victory Song

Mana:

So as people probably know, I quit sort of early. I had the lead only because I expanded quickly in the beginning. This, my friends, was an extremely terrible idea, as I found out. Slow expand, make sure your stars can be easily defended. As a game, Neptune’s Pride was interesting, but it needs to be tuned more for player convenience. For one thing, it needs more information. It’s still a very spreadsheet like game. It also tries to be asymmetric, time wise, but it is far from that, because of ship jumps and the inability of your opponent (or yourself) to defend. On top of that, I tend to dislike games that end in a slow painful death. This was definitely one of those. It needs to be a bit more mitigated, otherwise, it’s just flatout discouraging if you don’t win. Will I play this again? I’m not sure, more likely not. I’ve got too many games to play, and Neptune’s Pride eats up time like no other. But I enjoyed what I did play, I will firmly say. Congrats to Max Ironcock (EGTF). He was pretty nice to me in the beginning.

Poseison:

Somehow, my fleets managed to take enough of WasteManager’s stars to secure second place for the Brush-Heads. Pan’s Penis and my other fleets flitted gracefully from one star to another as his panting fleets struggled to keep up. It was like watching Tom and Jerry back on earth. The paw would come down devastatingly, but always too late. If our war had continued, the Tentacle may have prevailed. I only had around 700 ships to command when Ironcock captured that final star.
It remains to be seen what is in store for the galaxy under the rule of his exoskeleton.

I sit at the star console for the last time. The past month has been the most intense of my life. Back on Earth I was a regular Professor of Folklore and Mythology at the Miskatonic. Here, on Chertan, I am supreme God-Ruler of a race of subservient toilet cleaners. I stepped into a gladitorial ring filled with tougher and more experienced opponents and not only survived, but elevated the status of the Brush-Heads to galactic prominence. No longer would they pay tribute to the fishbowl headed insectoids, the space cucumbers, or the convulsing tentacles.

I must go soon to greet my people. Wait, what is this? A message from the Acolytes of the Bowl…

They say that I have failed! Failed! What more did they expect? I did my best. One can’t make diamonds from dross! Why didn’t they take Deep Blue, Garry Kasparov, or Sun-Tzu? To anyone listening to this: I made you. You were a race of cretinous servants! I taught your princess the meaning of love!

*Knock*

It can’t be. They’re here.

*Bang*

No, wait! You don’t know what you’re doing. Where do you think you’ll be without m-

<>

They bundled him into a palanquin borne by four acolytes. The streets they passed were empty and silent. The Great Bowl loomed in the horizon and Poseidon Smith knew his fate. But damned if it wouldn’t take two flushes.

***

So, this was my first time playing a 4X strategy game and I’m not sure if I’ll ever play anything like it again. Never has a game been so tied to my real life in terms of thought and time. The duration of ship journeys and research targets rarely left my mind as I went to work, cooked, or even played games. Neptune’s Pride is always on: it isn’t confined to nice little compartments of time that we can give to other games. Sure, you could get by just checking the map a couple of times a day (and I did, at the start) but, if you want to win, you probably need to keep tabs on the game every few hours at least.

Glancing at the other reports and remembering what happened in the game makes me realise that I never really betrayed anyone. I never violated an agreement. There was some social engineering involved, certainly, mainly in an attempt to stop more powerful people from attacking me, but I never entered an alliance with the intent to backstab my partner. Part of this was probably because I didn’t know any of the other players before this: I couldn’t be sure they would trust me and a lot of potential prognostication based on personality just wasn’t there. That I had not shown an inclination towards deceit may have factored into Ironcock’s decision to help me out at the end, though my actions were borne of necessity rather than choice. I was sandwiched between two vastly superior foes and my choice was made for me when WasteManager attacked and Ironcock extended the paw of peace. By that point Ironcock was powerful enough to have taken half my systems in a day: he didn’t need to trick anyone.

The game was a long slog, with stretches of nerve-wracking immobility, yet the latter stages were somehow even more thrilling because of that. The emphasis on defence in ship combat let to several standoffs that lasted for days as the players sized each other up, especially in the middle and the early latter stages of the game. In contrast, the landgrabs at the end were characterised by quick patterns of movement and shifting fortunes.

I am, on the whole, content. I played a lot better than I expected to and came away with an acceptable position.

Dante:

What really screwed me over here is the early failure to invest in economy. Economy powers the rest of your infrastructure and as I realised late on re-investing it, although it leaves you open, can allow you to boom fast. This is what I should have done early on, before the others accelerated away. Unfortunately the poor quality of my planets, and the early skirmishes with Ironcock (which happened in my territory, thus weakening me far more than him) hampered me in that respect.

I enjoyed the diplomacy far more than the game itself, I think, unfortunately I think after reading other accounts of Neptune’s Pride games, the rest of the players got very cautious, and were unwilling to join in with my extravagant mind games. Turning Poseidon and Miker on each other was the best moment for me, I don’t even want to know if my lies factored in, I just want to hope they did.

The end when it came though, was very cruel, Ed’s backstab was so incredibly treacherous, and came at a time when I posed no threat, when I was arguably more beneficial to him alive. It really turned me off the game and I slowly stopped bothering to log in. It has, however, left me with a burning rage that, though it will not be sated in this game, will continue the next time we face off.

“Let it be known Max Ironcock, you’d better watch your back, because I will have my vengeance sir, in this life or the next!”

Ludo:

Well, I came last. It was a matter of overxpanding and then not having enough fleets to defend my many planets. Between WasteManager’s lie and Miker’s competent warmongering I was quickly and effectively dispatched, but I was involved enough to get a feel for the game, and I hung around as long as I could just to see what would happen. Reading the interactions between the other players in this diary has been a revelation. The tangled web of alliances gave us a level of strategic complexity that no AI could produce, which is cool.

Neptunes is a game of cold, hard numbers. The outcome of every fight is mathematically set in stone, making every conflict predictable. On the one hand this simplicity is the beauty of Neptune’s Pride. There’s a huge amount of strategic potential in this relatively basic system, but at the same time it loses the layer of unpredictability that makes it possible for the underdog to keep on fighting. In Neptunes the biggest alliances always win.

Playing Neptunes is also painful in a way that other games aren’t. At its very heart lies the inevitability of betrayal. To win you must betray your friends and be betrayed in turn. Losing is a slow and horrible process, leaving you doomed to expire over the course of days with no way to fight back. The glacial pace is addictive and the way it all gently unfolds lends a sense of scale to the proceedings, but it makes losing all the harder to bear.

Now I understand the mechanics better, and understand the need for science and the usefullness of trade I’d be tempted to play Neptunes again. At the same time it is a big undertaking. I personally wish there was a way to adjust the length of time it takes to play a game. A game of Neptunes over the course of an afternoon would be excellent. That way your mistakes wouldn’t haunt you for weeks, the betrayals would hurt slightly less and the merits of the simple but elegant strategy system would shine through.

Miker:

If I sound detached about Neptune’s Pride by now, it’s because I am. With no chance of winning or even impeding Ironcock’s steamroll, I no longer had any sort of stake in the galaxy’s fate. As the game drew on, the only times I signed into Neptune’s Pride were the morning and evening – a far cry from the bi-hourly coke habit it used to be.
I can’t say for sure if I genuinely enjoyed Neptune’s Pride. There was a period during which I tried convincing everybody to give it a go, but looking back, it may have only been because I was winning. While I can see the elegance and minimalism in its design that everybody raves about, it’s those same elements that makes it so impossibly stressful and heartbreaking when you realize your empire’s fall will be stretched out over almost an entire month. Now maybe I’m just being bitter about losing.
Either way, I don’t think I can see myself getting the itch to play Neptune’s Pride for at least a few more months. It’s a game of endless suspense and tiny climaxes, many of which lead nowhere. After playing for almost an entire month, I’ve come to realize that it’s not my type of game. It’s far too slow, too intellectual, too difficult for my tastes, which I originally thought were more rather sophisticated. Winning in games isn’t everything for me – I stick around after getting steamrolled in Team Fortress 2 – but Neptune’s Pride is a type of losing that I can’t stand. If nothing else, it’s taught me a lot of things about my own gaming habits.
None of this should turn you off of playing Neptune’s Pride. It is, without a doubt, an excellent achievement in minimalism in game design. I honestly can’t think of anything quite so strategic out there right now, and its depth is even more impressive considering how deceptively simple the rules are.
It’s not for me, but that doesn’t change the fact that it deserves to be played. It’s there – right there – in your browser. Go sign up for a free game. Then come back for a month later and tell us what you think.